Posterized: The Best of Icelandic Cinema

by Nathaniel R

A few weeks back we celebrated Romanian cinema due to Whistlers, their most recent Oscar submission, hitting VOD. Why not follow suit today as Iceland's latest Oscar submission, A White White Day, arrives for home viewing? A White White Day is a moving character study about a widower dealing with new revelations about his wife after her death in a car accident. Meanwhile he's building a home for his daughter against the Icelandic landscape which makes for memorable recurring tableaus. We reviewed it at TIFF last year and it's worth checking out. Especially if you love Nordic cinema or are familiar with the work of Iceland's greatest movie star Ingvar E Sigurdsson, who is typically perfect here. We imagine that this film would have ruled this year's Edda Awards (Iceland's Oscars essentially) but the Eddas have been postponed indefinitely (they were originally scheduled for March) due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

And on that note let's look back at the most essential, famous, acclaimed, influential (or some combo thereof) Icelandic films of the past 40 years via our Posterized series. We've put asterisks beside all the titles that star Sigurdsson since we love him and you will too after screening A White White Day.

How many of these 18 Icelandic films have you seen? 

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Review: "Adrift"

by Chris Feil

Adrift opens with one of the more terrifying examples of recent one-take fakeout shots - the camera weaves in and out of the water overtaking the cabin of a yacht, as a bloodied Shailene Woodley comes to. Frantically, we follow her above deck to see the half-sunken ship is as irrevocably damaged as we feared. But the panic really comes as the camera dizzyingly reveals nothing but empty steady ocean surrounding her.

The film abruptly flashes back, alternating between her story leading up to crisis and her struggle for survival at sea. Woodley is Tami, a young world traveler avoiding a tumultuous family history at home in America. She meets a handsome and similarly dispositioned Richard, played by Sam Claflin, and their romance is fast and escapist. A lucrative job sailing an older couple’s yacht across the Pacific sets them on a course for disaster, one that leaves Richard incapacitated and Tami left with minimal sailing skills, no tools for communication, and a ship barely capable of more than a steady drag towards an imprecise destination.

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