A recently bereaved policeman suspects a friend of adultery with his now-dead wife in this edge-of-seat psychological drama-thriller
This bizarre and sometimes scary film from Iceland has a way of keeping you off balance and on the edge of your seat. It is a psychological drama-thriller involving startling aesthetic choices from its writer-director Hlynur Palmason, switching up in its third act from subtlety to unsubtlety, but with stunning, deliberate force. For most of the time, the film has been a slow burner, and yet the final 20 minutes or so reveal that this slow burning has merely been that of the lit fuse, fizzling and crackling its way towards the
bomb.
Like The Lord of the Rings, this film ends a number of times, and there was more than one moment when I was (wrongly) certain that the final credits were about to roll. Yet it never ceases to exert a grip, especially with its enigmatic opening sequence showing a car driven at speed across a hazy landscape: we are invited to suspect a clever twist … and then un-suspect it.