The deaths of two young girls some thirty years apart set in motion a story that will eventually encompass the story of two fathers in particular and an entire nation in general in Baltasar Kormákur’s masterful Myrin (Jar City). In his adaptation of the novel by Arnaldur Indridason, the writer-director successfully combines the elements of a police procedural, a film noir, a thriller and a modern socio-anthropological study to create a fully formed portrait of the modern Icelandic people as it has never been seen on screen. At once wholly Icelandic and completely accessible for foreign audiences, Myrin reverberates with strong echoes of what it means to be Icelandic, what it means to be part of a family and what it means to be human. After having dominated the local boxoffice last year, Myrin looks set to conquer foreign arthouses with equal ease.

The portraits of these three men, two living and one dead, are linked in ways both visible and invisible. It is a gripping template for a story about how family ties influence not only who we are but also how they can sometimes dictate our behaviour. Though Kormákur jumbles the timeline at certain intervals and there are many chilly moments straight from the thriller book, Myrin is not a whodunit in the classical sense but a "whydunit".

 

It is this interest in the humans behind the horror that makes Myrin stand out from the crowd. Several of the film’s best scenes do not even bear directly on the police procedural narrative, including a spine-chilling scene in which Erlendur has dinner while reciting a part of the Bible. The way in which Kormákur choreographs all his elements to obtain the desired effect shows his maturity as a director.

 

As in the scene mentioned, the director often marries thematic and visual concerns, enlarging his police research story to portray Icelandic society as a whole -- and as a society is does not seem to be doing too well. Pornography, as the antithesis of love, is never far from the screen, while his juxtaposition of images of death and food are sometimes downright shocking, all contributing to the idea of a decaying society that feeds on itself.

 

As part of this approach, the director and cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson also focus on the natural, barren beauty of Iceland, and rarely have the landscapes of a country been so well integrated into a story as here. The Icelandic title, which literally translates as The Marshes, underlines this even more -- as Holberg’s home is constructed on marshland.

 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.de. 

 

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