Beautiful Beings

Berdreymi

Still from Beautiful Beings
Courtesy of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

VERDICT: Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.

The first scenes of Beautiful Beings are incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Balli (a bullied kid played by Askell Einar Palmason) gets beaten up by his mates outside school. Not long after he finds his jacket immersed in a toilet bowl. With eyes on the floor, as if avoiding daylight, he drags his wet jacket home just before a gang of boys get to him, demanding he wear it.

Feeling humiliated by his ordeal, he smacks one of them with the wet jacket. In retaliation, his assailant picks up what appears to be a fallen tree branch and hits him right on the face. He’s wounded so badly that a TV report shows him wearing a mask in the hospital. But his travails are not quite over.

After leaving the hospital, another group of kids finds him as he takes a razor to his wrist. They force him to drink what appears to be liquid medicine. But they are touched enough to take the “filthy inbred” to the home he shares with his absent and absent-minded mother.

When the same kids return to Balli’s home, writer-director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson gives us a break from showing the cruelty of children. His story is lensed almost tenderly by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. The man who found success with Victoria back in 2015 finds pockets of poetry in this film’s Icelandic setting. There’s none of the mobile bravura of Victoria here, but his work with shadows, silhouettes, and interiors could be postcards. And when an element of the supernatural comes into play, Grøvlen takes an understated approach, adding delicacy to the story’s ambiguity.

The supernatural element comes through Addi, the film’s version of the honest Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. He’s the one who finds and befriends Balli. His partners in bad behaviour, Konni and Siggi, are not quite kind but they respect him enough to absorb Balli. What they offer is friendship—but it is not a wholesome kind of friendship. Konni, the group’s leader, is brutish and likely to pick random fights. Siggi gets manhandled frequently by Konni, but sticks around. All three of them have family issues which they handle in their own way, the most interesting of which has one stepdad drinking whiskey spiked with dog semen. (You have to watch the film to understand how it works.)

This aspect of tracing childhood bullying to the adults in the room (or absent from the room) seems a bit like Guðmundsson is playing amateur psychologist with his script. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. And it surely helps this remarkable film that all of its actors—especially the kids—are entirely convincing, from teenage acne to posture.

Running over two hours, Beautiful Beings does not outstay its welcome. But its greatest achievement might be its handling of its supernatural subplot. Where certain films from Western filmmakers appear to mock beliefs in the supernatural, this one treats such beliefs with respect. It is not quite possible to guess Guðmundsson’s personal beliefs, but his script never really makes a case for one or the other. In any case, his concerns here are with children and the people that raise them. You could sum it up with the popular Philip Larkin line: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” Beautiful Beings adds something extra just for you: Your stepparents, too.

Director, Screenplay: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Cast: Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson, Aníta Briem, Ísgerður Gunnarsdóttir
Producer: Anton Máni Svansson
Dir. of Photography: Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
Editor: Anders Skov, Andri Steinn Gudjónsson
Art Director: Aron Martin Ásgerðarson
Music: Kristian Eidnes Andersen

Sound: Jan Schermer

Production company: Joint Motion Pictures in association with Motor, Hobab, Film i Väst, Bastide Films, Negativ
World sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Horizons)
In Icelandic
123 minutes