3.5 stars (out of 5)
Something of an international hit from the still-fragile Icelandic film industry, writer/director Grímur Hákonarson’s character study is about life in an unforgiving landscape, the bitter arguments that can rage between siblings, the breakdown of an isolated town and how hairy old geezers can have meaningful relationships with sheep (and stop laughing at the back!!!).
Farmers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are brothers who live only a few hundred metres apart yet have not spoken in 40 years, their cranky communications going back and forth via a faithful sheepdog. Gummi is our chief focus, and it’s through him that we learn that the brothers are frequent winners in local ram competitions and that the valley’s community respects their professional methods – and their endless grudge.
When the word comes down that the deadly disease scrapie has apparently infected the brothers’ flocks, you might think that Gummi and Kiddi’s wall-of-ice would melt as they’re forced to work together, and yet Kiddi especially holds out, settling instead for shooting out his brothers windows and yelling drunkenly. Eventually it seems that scrapie will devastate the entire community and that all the sheep for miles around will need to be destroyed, leading to sequences that in other movies might (perhaps) have been darkly and bizarrely funny (Gummi tearfully kisses his favourite rams goodbye before killing them), but here prove surprisingly affecting (particularly if you had roast lamb for dinner last night).
Featuring such quiet, naturalistic performances that you can’t believe Sigurjónsson and Júlíusson weren’t real-life grubby old farmers who’d never acted before, Hákonarson’s drama might be a strange experience for those unschooled in the curious delights of Icelandic cinema (and you’d have to assume that that’s about 99% of the population). And yet it’s nevertheless a pleasingly modest and sometimes most moving offering in any language, and no matter how many sheep-shagging gags you might care to throw at it.
I Wake Up Screening 