Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

If ever there was a “cursed” film, this film would be it. For starters, John Frankenheimer was hired to direct, but had to withdraw for health reasons, tragically passing away shortly thereafter. Paul Schrader took his place, stepping into what would be one of his worst studio battles (and he had more than his share). Eventually, they hired yet another director to re-write, re-edit, and largely re-shoot the picture, but the results were so poorly received, Schrader was brought back to reshape his original footage into something salvageable. Eventually, his cut released one day after Star Wars: Revenge of the Stith opened. Cursed, right? However, William Peter Blatty had some nice things to say about Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which viewers can judge for themselves when it airs Tuesday night on the Movies! digital channel.

Arguably, the cruelty of the National Socialists Father Lankester Merrin witnesses in the prologue might be worse than that of the demon. The young Dutch parish priest was forced to make a horrific “Sophie’s Choice.” Since then, his position in the Church has been iffy and his faith even iffier. While he and they decide his future as a priest, Merrin works on archaeological digs throughout Africa, as a civilian.

His latest excavation in Kenya is a little….weird. Apparently, a pristine 5^th Century Byzantine church was buried under the sand as soon as it was completed. The art and architecture inside are stunning, but uncharacteristically, the statues of the Archangel Michael are pointed downward, in a protective posture.

As we all expect, inexplicable violent incidents start happening after the site is unearthed. The local tribe is particularly restive, so Major Granville arrives with his troops, which only further fans unrest. Father Merrin tries to defuse tempers, with the help of Father Francis, a devout missionary, and Dr. Rachel Lesno, a Holocaust survivor, who also suffers from painful memories of the war.

While the village and tribe descend into hatred, Cheche, the shunned beggar afflicted with woeful birth defects, makes a suspiciously “miraculous” recovery. Of course, horror fans know if something looks too good to be true, it is probably very bad news.

Reportedly, the studio wanted more jump scares, earlier and more consistently. Yet, the thoughtfulness of Schrader’s cut is its greatest strength. Obviously, we know what is coming. Ironically, the more Schrader forestalls the fire and brimstone, the more suspense he builds. The script, originally credited to William Wisher and Caleb Carr explores themes of evil and faith with surprising insight. Again, this adds further fuel to the demonic horrors, when they finally come. Plus, the design work that produced the hidden church is quite amazing.

Stellan Skarsgard and Gabriel Mann are both terrific as the good Fathers. Skarsgard broods quietly as the pre-Exorcist Father Merrin, but there is also deep complexity to his portrayal. Mann’s Father Francis is admirably earnest, but not simplistic. Clara Bellair also tacks a shrewdly understated approach to playing the survivor’s guilt-plagued Dr. Lesno. However, Billy Crawford looks completely out-of-place as Cheche and the way the character’s physical deformities are presented is also questionable.

What Remains: The Work of Three Skarsgards

It turns out mental hospitals for the criminally insane are especially depressing in Scandinavia. The cold weather and long, dark nights do little to liven up the ambiance. Regardless, that has been child-killer Mads Lake’s home since his late teen years. Evidently, his family’s house was far from nurturing. Perhaps that is why he develops weird, almost co-dependent relationships with his abnormal psychologist and the detective who originally investigated his case in Ran Huang’s What Remains, which releases this Friday in theaters and on demand.

Apparently, there were enough grounds under Finnish law to institutionalize Lake, but not enough to convict him of the heinous crimes everyone believes he committed. He was about to be released after a long confinement, but his tentative experiments with freedom were so disastrous, he hardly minds with his new shrink, Anna Rudebeck, cancels his release.

Instead, she starts delving into his psyche uncovering parental sexual abuse that seems pretty predictable. Meanwhile, crusty old Soren Rank (embodying a brand of existentialism far more fatalistic than Kierkegaard’s), who assisted the senior detective on the case years ago, starts interviewing Lake, under Rudebeck’s supervision, in hopes of uncovering information that might console the victims’ families.

What Remains is about as bleak as films get. It unfolds almost entirely in drab institutional buildings lit to evoke the drabness of Dogme 95 movement. This is supposed to be a thriller, but somehow the conflict, tension, and suspense were misplaced somewhere inside the grim Brutalist building.

The buck starts and stops with Huang, especially considering the quality of his primary trio. Stellan Skarsgard is perfectly cast as the world-weary Rank and Gustaf Skarsgard manages to be both creepy and pathetic, simultaneously, as Lake. Andrea Riseborough (who dared to be Oscar-nominated, even though the Academy did not pre-approve her candidacy) is also appropriately off-kilter and cerebral, playing the neurotic shrink.

Out Stealing Horses

Norway and Sweden have a close but complicated relationship, as Trond Sander’s family perfectly illustrates. He now lives in a remote cabin in Sweden, but in some ways, he never left the northern Norwegian logging country where he spent a formative summer in his early teens. Grieving a recent loss, Sander looks back on his last summer with his father in Hans Petter Moland’s adaptation of Per Petterson’s novel, Out Stealing Horses, which releases today on demand and in limited theaters.

After the death of his beloved wife, late-middle-aged Sander moved to rural Sweden (just before Y2K), where his thoughts often turn to his father. He was a manly, taciturn man, who spent long stretches away from his family. Back in 1948, his son assumes it was due to curmudgeonly chauvinism, but he will come to doubt that conclusion during the course of the summer.

The drama starts for Sander on the morning he and his friend Jon Haug go “out stealing horses.” By that, they mean joy-riding wild horses they corral in the woods. Unbeknownst to Sander, Haug is in a dark mood, because of a recent family tragedy. Sander is not particularly sensitive, but he still notices how the unfortunate events expose fissures in the Haug family that also seem to involve his father. Yes, Sweden will also factor into the events that unfold.

Since Out Stealing is set during the immediate post-war era, it rather logically follows that the Sanders and Haugs are still carrying baggage from the occupation. Yet, it is a relatively minor, but important element, in Sander’s coming of age story. There is a whirlwind of love unrequited, love not-so-secretly requited, simmering jealousy, and bitter regret swirling about him. We can certainly understand why this summer interlude had such a profound psychological impact on him. However, the 1999 sequences are not merely tacked on buffers, but actually hold quite a bit of significance of their own.

Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

It is not just one of the earliest novels in publishing history. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is also one of the most self-referential, postmodernist novels in the history of the form. In large measure, this is due to the extended passages in the second published part, wherein the title character disowns and protests the various apocryphal accounts of the delusional knight-errant written by pretenders. You would hope that kind of dialogue between text and reality would bring out the playfulness in Terry Gilliam, but he shows surprising (and perhaps disappointing) restraint when it comes to the meta-ness of his long-awaited Quixote (and maybe Quixotic) film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Years ago, Toby Grummett shot a student film adaptation of Quixote on-location in Spain. It made a bit of a name and reputation for him, but he squandered it with his subsequent sell-out commercial work. Now, he has returned to Spain to shoot a Quixote-themed commercial for an ambiguous company owned by a Russian gangster. Alexei Mishkin might be dangerous, but he represents good business for Grummett’s boss (a.k.a. “The Boss”). Not surprisingly, the shoot does not go smoothly, so the frustrated and disillusioned filmmaker just walks away when he realizes how close he is to the town where he filmed his student Don Quixote.

Alas, the intervening years have not been kind to Javier Sanchez, the old cobbler he cast as Quixote, and Angelica Fernandez, the young girl who played Dulcinea. The association with Quixote has had a corrosive effect on Sanchez’s mind, leaving him convinced he really is the chivalrous knight. In the case of Fernandez, Grummett’s sweet talking convinced her she really could be a star, but instead, she wound up as Mishkin’s kept (and abused) woman.

Frankly, it is a little surprising there has not been more fanfare hailing the long-delayed release of Gilliam’s notorious film. Surely, it must be the only film that had a behind-the-scenes documentary (Lost in La Mancha) released seventeen years before its theatrical opening. Obviously, this is not the same exact Man Who Killed Gilliam would have made back then, which is probably a shame. The film we have is more than a little scattershot, particularly the third act, which gets clumsily didactic. Nobody likes Russian oligarchs, but (Spanish actor) Jordi Molla portrayal is a caricature of villainy well beyond any possible reality.

Jonathan Pryce is gaunt and convincingly addled as Sanchez/Quixote, but even more importantly, he consistently conveys a keen sense of the man’s innate dignity. Joana Ribeiro is easily the standout for her finely shaded, emotionally compelling performance as Fernandez. Adam Driver is desperately manic as Grummett, but he is as hit-or-miss as the film he appears in. Likewise, Stellan Skarsgard falls back on his old bag of cliched tricks as the crass “Boss.” However, Olga Kurylenko plays his lover Jacqui as quite the entertaining hot mess of a femme fatale.

It is always problematic when we find ourselves giving sensitivity lessons to films, but it should be pointed out the generally preferred terms are “Roma” (or “Rom”) and “Sinti,” rather than “gypsy.” More problematic, Gilliam never really exploits the opportunities Quixote offers for playing games with ostensive reality. Just consider the very premise, whereby Sanchez becomes deluded into believing he is a literary character who is himself famously deluded. That implies he is operating under two levels of delusion.

In at least one way, TMWKDQ directly compares to Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. After waiting years for both, they turned out to be just okay. Gilliam shows flashes of inspiration and we can see echoes of Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King, but diminishing return set in around the midway point. It is the sort of film you will want to like more than you really will. Recommended as an eventual online streaming option for the curious, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote opens tomorrow (4/19) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

NYICFF ’19: Gordon & Paddy

Paddy is a mouse of mystery. She has no home, no profession, and no history. However, she has a keen sense of smell, so Gordon taps her to be his successor as police superintendent of the forest. The mouse and the toad will do some good police work together, but the shadow of the feared fox looms over every case in Linda Hambäck’s Gordon & Paddy, which screens during the 2019 New York International Children's Film Festival.

Paddy didn’t even have a name of her own until she met Gordon. It was not an auspicious first meeting. Technically, he collared her boosting a stray nut from a crime scene, but Gordon is no Javert. He is not about to bust someone for being hungry. He is also grateful to Paddy for digging him out of a snowdrift. Once he discovers how keen her sense of smell is, he recruits her to assist his investigation of the squirrel’s purloined winter cache of nuts.

Soon, he also starts to groom her to take over as the forest superintendent. Unfortunately, Paddy’s first solo case in her new position will be even more serious—and all signs ominously point towards the formidable fox.

G&P is an absolutely charming little (at 65 minutes, it is indeed little) film that will leave even the most cynical curmudgeons smiling from ear to ear. Hambäck’s animated film, based on a Swedish children’s book by Ulf Nilsson & Gitte Spee, is fully stocked with cute forest critters, but there are surprisingly high stakes to Paddy’s cases. Nevertheless, G&P has a pleasant, easy-going vibe that makes the film appropriate for kids of all ages.

Seasoned Gordon is also quite an old soul. Frankly, he is a more distinctive character than three-fourths of the stock figures we get in mainstream live-action movies. Stellan Skarsgård’s gruff but warm voice-over performance is absolutely pitch-perfect. Frankly, it is probably the best we have heard since Dominic West lent his silkily sinister voice to the Big Bad Wolf in Revolting Rhymes.

There is nothing particularly groundbreaking or daring about G&P, but every frame is a cheerfully winning viewing experience. Ironically, one of the most humanistic films you will see on the festival circuit this year is entirely about forest critters. Very highly recommended for families and animation fans, Gordon & Paddy screens tomorrow (2/23) at Scandinavia House, the following Sunday (3/3) at the Cinepolis Chelsea, and the Saturday after that (3/9) at the IFC Center, as part of this year’s NYICFF.

Borg vs. McEnroe

Even tennis was better in the eighties, but as was often the case, we just didn’t appreciate it at the time. Frankly, many sports fans were rather embarrassed by John McEnroe’s slightly argumentative demeanor on the court, but once he resigned from the tour, everyone started to miss his passion for the game. In contrast, Bjorn Borg was the perfect model of a gentleman tennis champion, but he did not have a catch-phrase, so it is harder to remember him. Fortunately, we can now relive their defining meeting at the 1980 Wimbledon finals in Janus Metz’s Borg vs. McEnroe (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Borg had already won four Wimbledon titles. A record setting fifth would guarantee his place in tennis Valhalla, but that also raised the media’s expectations to a fever pitch. McEnroe was the second-ranked player behind Borg and widely acknowledged as the only real threat to five-peat. However, he was also known for expressing his disappoint from time to time when a line judge called a ball in a manner McEnroe disagreed with. The other players also thought he was a jerk. As a result, just about everyone in the stadium was rooting against McEnroe, except his father.

In some ways, Metz and screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl cast Borg and McEnroe as a perfectly matched pair of personality hang-ups, with the sullen and neurotic Borg on one side of the net and the obnoxious and immature McEnroe on the other. Yet, they still manage to make the film highly compelling and consistently fun. Although it is not as sly and subversive as I,Tonya, B vs. M still bears many similarities in the way it seamlessly recreates an era and then forces viewers to re-examine our assumptions and biases from those times. One thing comes through clearly, McEnroe might have been many things, but he cared about the game and always gave it his all.

There is no question Sverrir Gudnason is a spooky dead-ringer for Borg, but he is such an angsty cold fish, his long-suffering coach Lennart Bergelin becomes our primary POV figure in the Team Borg scenes. Not surprisingly, the eternally reliable Stellan Skarsgård becomes the film’s rock of dignity as Bergelin. However, the real surprise is how far Shia LaBeouf finally comes into his own as McEnroe. Although there is not a lot of natural resemblance between the actor and the mercurial athlete, LaBeouf so completely nails the mannerisms and persona, he just starts to look like McEnroe in our mind’s eye.

Metz also deserves credit for maintaining the suspense and drama of their 1980 finals match-up. Obviously, it had to be a barnburner, or nobody would have bothered making this movie (just like there will never be a film about the Yankees 4-0 victory over the Padres in the 1998 World Series, even though it was a lot of fun to watch at the time). Yet, Metz really stages it with cinematic flair.

Even if you are not a tennis fan, B vs. M still holds plenty of entertainment value as a carefully crafted time capsule from 1980. Needless to say, it is vastly superior to the 2004 rom-com Wimbledon (which, for what its worth, is actually not terrible). Highly recommended, Borg vs. McEnroe opens this Friday (4/13) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor

It turns out Putin even ruined the Russian Mob. They used to be reasonable gangsters a money launderer like Dima Vladimirovich Krasnov could do business with. Unfortunately, the newly installed boss is far more vicious than any of the old school Thieves By Law. Knowing his days are numbered, Krasnov reaches out to the least imposing Brit he can find in Susanna White’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel Our Kind of Traitor (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Gail Perkins is rather bent out of sorts when her husband Perry Makepeace allows the free-spending Dima to whisk him away for a night of partying, but the Russian can be persuasive. He is desperate, in fact. The money launderer is scheduled to sign over his accounts to the entitled gangster heir, aptly dubbed Prince, at which time, what happened to his colleague in the prologue will mostly likely befall Dima and his family. Somehow Krasnov convinces the skittish Makepeace to carry a list of names to British intelligence, much to the appalled surprise of his wife.

Dima’s intel might just be too good. One of his names is Aubrey Longrigg, the up-and-coming cabinet minister, with whom counter-intelligence specialist Hector Meredith holds a deeply personal grudge. Krasnov promises the corresponding account numbers in exchange for his family’s safety. Not one to be deterred by skeptical bureaucrats, Meredith goes off the books, keeping his close associates and Makepeace, the designated go-between, in the dark. However, when the Longrigg’s political allies try to put the kibosh on the operation, Makepeace and Perkins double-down with Meredith out of loyalty to Dima’s family.

On the spectrum of le Carré adaptations, Traitor is one of the better efforts without George Smiley. As Meredith, Damian Lewis is no Sir Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman, but he is still more than the equal of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was indeed the best thing about A Most Wanted Man.

Yet, it is Stellan Skarsgård who really propels the film as the flamboyant Krasnov. Frankly, his wardrobe might be the film’s greatest special effect. Mark Gatiss and Khalid Abdalla add further heft and flair portraying Meredith’s cloak-and-dagger colleagues. Technically, Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris are the leads, but their low energy bickering is the least interesting aspect of the film. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle gives it all the austere sheen of a Norman Foster building, but Marcelo Zarvos score is disappointingly classy, in a non-descript sort of way.

Unlike many le Carré narratives, screenwriter Hossein Amini’s adaptation does not bogged down in a lot of details. This is the rare le Carré that you watch for the characters rather than the twists—and Skarsgård’s Dima is most definitely a character. It also allows Meredith to take a stand against moral equivalency while squarely planting the villain’s mustache on Putinist Russia. We’ll take that in a le Carré film any day. Recommended with enthusiasm, Our Kind of Traitor opens this Friday (7/1) in New York at several theaters, including the AMC Empire, and in Brooklyn at BAM.

Tribeca ’14: In Order of Disappearance

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then provincial Norway is the perfect place for it. Technically, Nils Dickman is Swedish and he will serve up payback with Ikea-like efficiency in Hans Petter Moland’s comic noir In Order of Disappearance (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Dickman (yes, there are comments made regarding his surname) is not a gangster, he is a snowplow driver, but he becomes a very put-out snowplow driver when his son is murdered by a drug gang. Maybe it is in his blood. His older brother was once a gangster, nick-named “Wingman” in honor of Top Gun. Dickman’s anger and initiative are sufficient to ice the low level lackeys who administered his son’s fake overdose, but he will need some help getting to their boss, a legacy kingpin known as “The Count.” As Dickman works his way up the food chain, The Count responds by igniting a gang war with the Serbian mob he assumes is responsible for his underlings’ disappearances.

For some reason, Tribeca programmers have a soft spot for films about snowplow drivers. Even though Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’s Whitewash won last year’s best new narrative director award, Disappearance is the film to see. Screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (who also wrote the radically different Perfect Sense) neatly balances moody revenge drama (in the tradition of the original Death Wish) with generous helpings of dry, black comedy. In fact, there is a running visual gag that gets funnier and funnier through repetition.

On the other hand, Stellan Skarsgård plays it scrupulously straight as Dickman. He is about as Nordic as a vigilante can get. Despite his severe reserve, viewers get a sense he is so tightly wound, he might shatter if he tipped over. It takes a couple beats to realize the ever-reliable Bruno Ganz appears as the grieving Serbian godfather (known simply as Papa), but his sly turn adds the icing to this frozen ice-cream cake.

On paper, Disappearance would sound like a grim and slightly gory story, but it is great fun on the screen. Moland’s subtle touch and Aakeson’s inventive but rigorously logical plot developments keep the audience locked in every step of the way. Highly recommended for fans of gangster movies with a sardonic attitude, In Order of Disappearance screens again Sunday (4/20) and Wednesday (4/23) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Lars Volume One

When Lars von Trier and the increasingly controversial Shia LaBeouf collaborate on a film, it creates a certain level of expectations. Add in a generous helping of explicit sexual content and you would anticipate of perfect storm of provocation. Instead, it will be fans of the Dogma 95 co-founder who will feel vindicated by his latest bout of risk-taking. Far from a source of joy, sex is an act of existential alienation in von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, Volume One (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Seligman is a good Samaritan, who offers to take Joe to a hospital when he finds her battered in the street. She firmly demurs, only reluctantly allowing the older man to patch her wounds in his nearby flat. Joe not only blames herself for her alarming state, she rather seems to think she had it coming. She will explain why over a hot cup of tea.

Joe discovered her power turn men into animals at a young age. Like a playboy notching his belt, she regularly challenges her chum B to a contest of who can score the most men in a given period. However, B starts breaking one of their cardinal rules, allowing affection (or worse still, love) to influence her erotic pursuits. As a result, Joe becomes a solitary seducer, who deliberately leaves broken lives in her wake. Yet, Seligman insists on finding redemptive elements in each of her tales—or so he tries, in between fishing analogies and literary allusions.

Nevertheless, Joe’s self-indictment is consistently and cumulatively damning. In a particularly memorable episode, Mrs. H outdoes Medea, shaming her wayward husband and the trampy Joe by crashing their vice-pad with her shockingly young sons. Yet, Joe really is not shamed. She is already hollow inside, desensitized by her carnal compulsions.

Yes, there is a lot of sex and nudity in Volume One, but it is not the least bit seductive or titillating. Instead, this is an unrated morality tale, which explicitly cautions viewers of the dire consequences wrought by divorcing sex from love (or least like to a reasonable extent).

It should be noted, this all applies solely to Volume One seen independently of Volume Two. Based on the teaser that runs during the closing credits, von Trier apparently cranks up the lurid content of the concluding installment. Whether or not this anticipated foray into Shades of Grey territory will come with a disingenuous claim of “empowerment” remains to be seen. Nonetheless, Volume One ends at an oddly logical and unsettling point.

Frankly, it is not the naughty business that is interesting, but the conversations between the not-as-young-as-she-used-to-be Joe and Seligman. Von Trier’s language is highly literate and rich with meaning. Past von Trier alumni Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgård quickly develop the darnedest screen chemistry, encompassing morbid fascination and humanist compassion. Despite the film’s explicit content, von Trier assembled quite a cast, including Uma Thurman, who knocks the wind out of viewers as the ferocious Mrs. H.

In a case of trial by fire, Stacy Martin makes a bold screen debut as the twenty-something Joe, but her character is so glacially reserved, the role better demonstrates her willingness to serve the needs of a film rather than her emotional range, per se. On the other hand, Christian Slater cannot shake off his snarky b-list persona as Joe’s henpecked father. (By the way, if any von Trier fans are wondering, Udo Kier will duly appear in Volume Two.)

With Volume One, von Trier stakes a claim to being a truly subversive contrarian. He makes sex look like no fun whatsoever. In fact, hedonism takes a toll on the soul and inextricably leads to some very dark places. Better to go fishing instead. Recommended for mature, fully informed audiences as a film in its own right, Nymphomaniac Volume One opens this Friday (3/21) in New York downtown at the Landmark Sunshine and uptown at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Youth in Revolt: King of Devil’s Island

The Bastøy Boys Home was no Boys Town. Neither was the governor any sort of Father Flanagan. Yet, both were considered above reproach until a violent uprising amongst the student-inmates shocked Norway. Their doomed revolt and the events that precipitated it are vividly dramatized in Marius Holst’s King of Devil’s Island (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

In 1915, the Christian progressive zeal for reform was evidently as alive in Norway as it was in America. On the surface, Bastøy perfectly fit preconceived notions of how juvenile offenders should be handled. Situated on an island in a fjord off the Oslo coast, it was pretty much winter year-round in Bastøy. That made escape through the icy waters essentially impossible. It also allowed plenty of time for character-building outdoor labor and moral instruction. However, the trustees were unaware of the secret corruption at the institution.

Governor Bestyreren suspects there is a reason why Bråthen has remained at Bastøy for so long. Unfortunately, since the cruel house-father is aware he has been skimming funds to support his young demanding wife, the governor takes a see-no-evil approach with his tightly wound subordinate. This will prove a wee bit short-sighted when two new boys arrive.

Rumored to be a murderer, Erling (a.k.a. C-19) is like the Randle Patrick McMurphy of Bastøy. Rebellious by nature, he opens contemplates escape, longing to return to a life at sea. Also arriving that day is Ivar (a.k.a. C-5), a weaker boy, ill-equipped to deal with either Bastøy’s harsh environment or Bråthen’s inappropriate attention. Tragically, circumstances escalate to a point that pushes head boy Olav (C-1) to the end of his tether.

Island could be thought of as a Norwegian Lord of the Flies, except it is rather more complex than that. We can see the governor maintain what we might now call plausible deniability, rather than behave as a hissably nefarious villain. Likewise, Erling and Olav are far from paragons of virtue, but they are still engaging young protagonists who are quite believably pushed too far.

Indeed, Holst maintains an admirably firm hand on the rudder at all times. Though the events might suggest wider allegorical meaning, he keeps the film grounded in the characters’ reality. Likewise, he never lets matters degenerate into a reign of terror, in any sense, even when the Norwegian Navy arrives to put down the insurrection (which astonishingly, really did happen).

Though he risks becoming permanently typecast as the unjust authority figure, Stellan Skarsgård brings instant credibility to Island as the compromised governor. He clearly knows how to play the heavy, while maintaining a sense of the character’s humanity. Yet, it is the film’s two young more or less co-leads who really deliver the goods. As C-1 and C-19 respectively, Trond Nilssen and Benjamin Helstad are pretty darn intense and compulsively watchable.

A fine period production from stem to stern, Island will make suggestible viewers feel chilly and damp at times. Holst and screenwriter Dennis Magnusson also deserves further credit for not harping on the religious hypocrisy of the governor and his clueless board of directors. Instead, it seems they fully understood the dramatic potential of this remarkable historical episode and set about telling it rather straightforwardly and compellingly. Recommended beyond the established audience for foreign films, Island opens this Friday (11/18) in New York at the Cinema Village and the San Francisco Film Society will present it for a one week run in early January (1/6-1/12).