Film Review: Rökkur (English: Rift)
I am back from whirlwind travels abroad (to Iceland and France) and will unload some thoughts in a few posts, starting with last first. On the flight home I watched a very good Icelandic movie I would like to recommend: Rökkur/Rift.
This film is an atmospheric, psychological thriller, not very scary but gripping and unsettling. It is also an extremely well scripted story about human relationships. A thirty-ish university professor, Gunnar, gets a mysterious phone call from his ex-boyfriend, Einar, indicating he might be in trouble. Gunnar goes to see Einer at his family's remote getaway cabin to see if things are okay. Einar says everything's fine; he just called when he was drunk and lonely, but weird events soon suggest some presence may be haunting them.
I use the word "haunting" because it feels like that. The story may generically fall into Todorov's Fantastic, where you can't quite tell if anything actually supernatural is happening. On balance… probably not? But the atmosphere, nonetheless, is ghostly and Einar's past surely haunted.
It's also a very well written gay love story in that it's not all about the leads being gay but it is nonetheless aware of the particular social stresses that still accompany being gay for these Millennials.
This story is all about the human psyche, with a focus on Gunnar and Einar as individuals and as a couple/ex-couple. It's a wonderful example of conveying a nuanced and completely believable relationship without heavy infodump. The two leads clearly love each other, yet they also broke up for a reason, most obviously because Einar is a borderline alcoholic and emotionally unstable. As Gunnar says, he can't babysit him. Yet Gunnar is not a saint either, and midway through the film Einar confronts him with his own complicity in their problems, poor communication, dishonesty, and failure to try to work through things before abruptly giving up and leaving.
I also have to give this film special props for one of the best discussions of rape I have ever heard in a narrative. And I do mean "discussion": it's people talking about a past event, nothing visually graphic. Without going into great spoilers, I will say it captures the murkiness of human interactions: conflicts, mixed feelings, the inflections of memory, and so on.
I have only two very mild niggles with this film:
1. It sometimes seems to imply some plot points that don't pay off-though this might partly be me losing things in translation. (I'm not fast at reading subs.)
2. I would describe the ending as "French," in that it lacks traditional conclusion. I'm not fond of that structure, in general, but beyond my personal tastes, this ending seemed out of character and implausible. I mean the very last scene; everything up to that point tracks. Maybe I just didn't "get it."
On the whole, I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in a strange and thoughtful story about human life and love, plus Iceland.
This film is an atmospheric, psychological thriller, not very scary but gripping and unsettling. It is also an extremely well scripted story about human relationships. A thirty-ish university professor, Gunnar, gets a mysterious phone call from his ex-boyfriend, Einar, indicating he might be in trouble. Gunnar goes to see Einer at his family's remote getaway cabin to see if things are okay. Einar says everything's fine; he just called when he was drunk and lonely, but weird events soon suggest some presence may be haunting them.
I use the word "haunting" because it feels like that. The story may generically fall into Todorov's Fantastic, where you can't quite tell if anything actually supernatural is happening. On balance… probably not? But the atmosphere, nonetheless, is ghostly and Einar's past surely haunted.
It's also a very well written gay love story in that it's not all about the leads being gay but it is nonetheless aware of the particular social stresses that still accompany being gay for these Millennials.
This story is all about the human psyche, with a focus on Gunnar and Einar as individuals and as a couple/ex-couple. It's a wonderful example of conveying a nuanced and completely believable relationship without heavy infodump. The two leads clearly love each other, yet they also broke up for a reason, most obviously because Einar is a borderline alcoholic and emotionally unstable. As Gunnar says, he can't babysit him. Yet Gunnar is not a saint either, and midway through the film Einar confronts him with his own complicity in their problems, poor communication, dishonesty, and failure to try to work through things before abruptly giving up and leaving.
I also have to give this film special props for one of the best discussions of rape I have ever heard in a narrative. And I do mean "discussion": it's people talking about a past event, nothing visually graphic. Without going into great spoilers, I will say it captures the murkiness of human interactions: conflicts, mixed feelings, the inflections of memory, and so on.
I have only two very mild niggles with this film:
1. It sometimes seems to imply some plot points that don't pay off-though this might partly be me losing things in translation. (I'm not fast at reading subs.)
2. I would describe the ending as "French," in that it lacks traditional conclusion. I'm not fond of that structure, in general, but beyond my personal tastes, this ending seemed out of character and implausible. I mean the very last scene; everything up to that point tracks. Maybe I just didn't "get it."
On the whole, I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in a strange and thoughtful story about human life and love, plus Iceland.