There’s something in the air in the Icelandic movie scene of late. The old directors of yore who used to monopolize the film commission for funding are out and a new, younger and somewhat hipper generation is taking their place with hopes to bring back Icelandic viewers in to the cinema again, after being absent from them for over a decade. You see, we have never really had what you’d call mainstream cinema. The early 80’s, the boom years for us, brought people to theatres in droves. Back then filmmakers had to fund their films themselves and had to be sure to make their money back by making audience friendly films. They relied on the public to save them from the third or fourth mortgage they put on their house. When the film commission was funded, they no longer needed to spend their own money so they could indulge themselves in what they wanted to make, films that looked like movies by their cinematic heroes from Germany, France, Eastern Europe and Asia. The public however, brought up on Hollywood fodder, couldn’t give two shits about those guys and looked elsewhere for entertainment. Filmmakers like Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, who became world known when his film Children of Nature was nominated for an Oscar, gave up on audiences here and focused on foreign film festivals and in the end sort of gave up all together when his films failed to impress even the foreign art house crowd. A few people have tried to make mainstream films through the years but in most if not all cases they have failed miserably. You see, there is this one thing that plagued most Icelandic filmmakers through the decades and they have hard time shaking it off. That pesky little thing called a script. Fridrik Thor’s movies might seem surreal and lyrical but that’s because he basically made them up as he went along. Most however tend to stick to the script but the thing is they just aren’t well written.
That has been the Achilles heel of most Icelandic films throughout the years and Iceland’s newest thriller Cold Trail is no exception. Which why I wrote this article to begin with.
I would say that Baltasar Kormakur’s Jar City is the first local film that has successfully dealt with the crime genre over here. It was low key, mundane and pretty much exactly how crime is over here. Cold Trail however tries to knock it up a notch with snow sled chases, people falling of high cliffs, shoot outs and a reindeer hunting conspiracy. Sounds exciting no?
The story follows a emotionally unattached tabloid reporter, Baldur, who finds out that a man, who apparently fell to his death by accident at an old dam in the highlands, was his father he never knew. He wants to know more about the old man and when he goes to see the corpse he notices a small puncture wound on his chest. Was the man murdered after all? Who knows?
The police show no interest in his murder theory so he packs his bag and somehow manages, in a matter of couple of days, to be hired as a night watchman at the dam, in the same position as his old man. There he tends to investigate the accident and to find out more about his father.
Baldur might just be the worst investigative reporter on the planet and doesn’t seem to understand the concept of low profile. You see he hires himself at the damn under false pretences but not ten minutes after he is introduced to the small staff he starts to ask everyone about the man who died, who he was, how he died and such but for some reason no one is suspicious. Some of the staff is hostile towards him because of a terrible conspiracy involving illegal reindeer hunting they don’t want him to know about and try to get rid of him.
But when he starts digging too deep some of the people start to worry that a few skeletons might start falling out of their closets and they can’t have that. But that’s not all. Oh no. It’s said that the dam is haunted and there are some signs of a ghostly visitation here and there but also there is the story of the ghost who raped the mother of a local woman Baldur befriends. Da da daaah! Hilarity ensues.
Writer/Director Bjorn Brynjulfur Bjornsson said that he and co writer Kristinn Thordarson had done an amazing 50 drafts of the script. 50!!! So much time and energy spent on the script and this…this horrible piece of crap was the best they could come up with? I would think that if you hadn’t cracked the story by the fifth draft you probably weren’t going to do it.
The script is all over the place and doesn’t really know which story it wants to focus on. One minute the ghost seems important, the next the reindeer hunting seems to be taking over the script and then of course the investigation of the suspected murder of the night watchman and the ghostly attack thirty years earlier.
Aside from the script being terrible the acting takes the cake. I sat squirming in my seat at the theatre all the way through because of bad delivery. Almost every time an actor opened his mouth I either laughed at the unintentionally funny dialog or shook my head in wonder. I know one of the things that the filmmakers had to do in post production was to do allot of ADR. That means that the actors have to read their lines again in a studio because the location sound was un-useable. The film was shot at a working dam and those things are noisy as hell and that’s the reason for the post dubbing. Icelandic actors are probably the worst when it comes to dubbing be it cartoons or movies. The emotion of their voice almost never matched to what we were seeing on the screen and the horrible dialog wasn’t helping either.
Baldur is played by Throstur Leo Gunnarsson. Some of you might remember him as Noi’s father in Noi Albinoi and by coinkidink Tomas Lemarquis, who played Noi, plays one of the staff members at the dam, poorly I might add. Throstur is a fine actor usually but this time he’s way off the mark. I think it’s mostly to do with bad writing, bad directing and bad dubbing.
But not all the acting can be blamed on the dubbing since the film doesn’t all take place inside the dam where there’s constant noise. Icelandic actors are 98% stage actors and many don’t have much film experience so they tend to take their stage experience to the set and act for the people in the back as they say in the theatre, which makes for some unconvincing performances. Hjalti Rognvaldsson who plays the head security guard at the dam really stands out as a poor actor in the film and this is unfortunate because he’s the second biggest character in the story. Hjalti is first and foremost a stage and radio actor and it show.
Our next Hollywood hopeful Anita Briem plays a small part as fellow journalist who works with Baldur at the newspaper but her part is completely irrelevant and one feels that she was only cast because she has made a couple of films abroad.
There are some diamonds hidden in this turd though. The cinematography is good through out the film but it changes to annoying hand held style towards the end which is distracting.
The music is also very good and would be perfect if the film was the adaptation of the latest Tom Clancy high tech thriller novel. If I had closed my eyes and listened I wouldn’t have thought that I was listening to the soundtrack of an Icelandic suspense drama. The music is turned to eleven in most places which is distracting at times but the biggest problem is that it doesn’t really belong in this film. The music is by Veigar Margeirsson, an Icelander who has worked mostly abroad for small films and movie trailers and when I heard that, the soundtrack made sense because it would be perfect as snippets in trailers for action films.
So what we are dealing with here is one of the biggest turkeys in Icelandic cinema I’ve seen in a very long time.
I don’t know how the film would translate to foreign audiences but for me at least this was just terrible. And to top it off they ripped off my poster design for Jar City. The nerve of some people?