In this exclusive feature Steve Gravestock, (pictured) finds a common thread to his 2015 Nordic selection and reviews each of the 14 titles selected including Baltasar Kormákur’s crime series Trapped (episode 1) opener of TIFF’s new Primetime.

“For me the most striking aspect of the Nordic films I saw this year was the fusion of two long running motifs, specifically the crumbling dysfunctional family and the impact and influence of nature or, perhaps more accurately, rural life.

Dysfunctional families have long been a mainstay of Nordic cinema. In a region where the weather can be an imminent threat sometimes for half the year, those closest to you -- physically and emotionally -- loom even larger in importance, as do their foibles and flaws. 

Nature and geography, of course, have likewise played significant roles. Bergman’s dramas about familial dysfunction were intensified immeasurably by the sense of isolation and the wintry colour schemes. Bent Hamer’s Kitchen Stories gently satirised the rectitude and emotional remoteness of the principals, but the comedy was made more resonant because of the characters’ near complete isolation. Over the last five years or so, nature and small town life has increasingly been viewed as an escape from confining, restrictive society, but instead of freedom from repression, isolation has allowed the characters’ ids to run rampant. (See Lars von Trier’s Antichrist; Ole Bornedal’s See No Evil; Kristian Levring’s Fear Me Not; Sara Johnsen’s All That Matters is Past; Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel’s Burrowing;  Jesper Ganslandt’s Farewell Falkenberg; and JP Valkeapaa’s They Have Escaped.)

This is especially true with one of the most striking and distinctive films in the programme, Hanna Skold’s harrowing Granny is Dancing on the Table, told from the perspective of a young woman who is ritualistically abused by her father, a practice validated by his singularly extreme religious beliefs. The beliefs and the abuse have been constants in the family for many years. The young girl finds solace by imagining the life of her grandmother, who escaped this cycle and travelled the world. Shuttling between ferociously minimalist near tableaus involving the heroine and her deranged parent where violence never seems far away and animated sequences depicting her grandmother living the highlife, the film skilfully demonstrates how the young girl’s flights of fancy are her sole defence against the terrors meted out by her father. 

The young heroes in Rúnar Rúnarsson’s Sparrows and Magnus Von Horn’s The Here After might actually prefer more isolation. In each of these films, the young protagonists must deal with communities that are small, claustrophobic, and isolated.

In the nuanced and sharply observed Sparrows, teenaged Ari is uprooted from his rich busy life in Reykjavik and sent to live with his derelict father in a remote fishing village. His father, Gunnar, has shown little or no interest in his son since he and his ex, separated and spends his weekends on monstrous benders turning his ramshackle house into party central, with every depraved activity in full view of the kid. Soon enough, Ari is confronted with a truly appalling act and he’s forced to make an almost untenable ethical choice in a film which in its themes of betrayal and neglect, its spirit and execution suggests classics like Shoeshine and The Children are Watching Us

In Magnus Von Horn’s The Here After, John returns to the small farming village after a stay at an unspecified institution. Both his father and little brother are nervous, possibly outright terrified of him – and he’s outright vilified and even persecuted by the townspeople and the kids in his high school. Belying his relative youth, Von Horn expertly balances the tensions between the often appalling treatment of John and a growing unease about what John might be capable of. Shot and scripted with precision, and rich with tension, The Here After is propelled by a great performance by pop star Ulrik Munther, whose carefully modulated performance simultaneously suggests a permanently wounded child and a terrifying blank slate.

It isn’t just youth who are plagued in this environment. Grímur Hákonarsons’s brilliant, often comic drama Rams focuses on two neighbouring sheep famers in their sixties. They also just happen to be brothers -- and the only combatants in a decade long feud. The fact that they are neighbours hasn’t ameliorated the situation – instead they prefer to wallow in their rage than get along with one another – a mind-set which threatens the livelihood their family has maintained for generations.

Not that the hinterlands are exclusively a playground for individual ids. They’re also where the metropoles banish their problems to.  For their scary and often grimly funny documentary Return of the Atom, Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola spent a decade charting the building of the first nuclear power plant in Europe since the Chernobyl disaster. Announced with much fanfare in 2004 as a joint public-private partnership on an international scale including the Finnish government and a French company, the plant is set to be located in a remote area, in a town which wasn’t even on the list of hundred best spots originally recommended. Instead of the glorious triumph promised, the story soon looks more and more like the building of the Springfield nuclear power plant with incompetent officials and flakes grasping desperately for justifications on camera, and arrogant executives extolling their experience. It also boasts some breath-taking eerie images of the plant being built.

The countryside is the scene for even creepier horrors in Anders Thomas Jensen’s sinister, outrageous comedy/drama Men & Chicken featuring a stellar Danish cast led by Mads Mikkelsen, David Dencik, Nicolas Bro and Nikolai Lie Kaas. Two brothers, one an academic (Dencik) who’s a disaster with women, and another, a twitchy slacker (Mikkelsen) who must perform a certain function every hour or fly off into a rage, find out that they were adopted and set off to a remote island to meet their birth father and half-brothers. Playing off the Prodigal son/homecoming dramas which were once staples of the Danish film industry, the film spirals into a horror comedy pushing every button possible while exploring what really makes us human.  It’s another unsettling very funny comedy from Jensen, a long-time favourite of TIFF’s. 

Isolation figures heavily in Trapped, the first episode in the smart noirish Icelandic television series by Baltasar Kormákur. The opening film in TIFF’s new Primetime section, Trapped follows a small town police chief who must deal with a body, a disgruntled and belligerent ferry captain, angry tourists, terrified townspeople, romantically distracted employees, and a potentially catastrophic storm effectively imprisoning all of them.

Meanwhile, in Roar Uthaug’s fast paced eco-disaster thriller The Wave, the myth of rural peace is decimated when the placid calm of a pristine fjord is destroyed by an avalanche and a resulting tsunami. Kristoffer Joner and Ane Dahl Torp are literally run out of their small town, an event which should have been foreseen by the local authorities who were too terrified by the political repercussions to sound the alarm bells when they had the chance.

The young characters in Girls Lost and Louder Than Bombs aren’t quite as isolated as the kids in the films discussed above, but that doesn’t seem to have helped them much.

Girls Lost, directed by Alexandre-Therese Keining, follows a group of three friends who are brutally bullied in the smallish high school they attend. One night, after a spectacularly bad day, they get drunk and wind up imbibing the strange milk coming from a weird unclassifiable flower growing in the greenhouse one tends to. They doze off and wake up as boys. Thrilled by the power their new identities give them, they try it again, with less positive results. But one of the girls is so enamoured of her new identity she can’t stop drinking the liquid, despite a vow they made that they would only do it together. The other girls see this as dangerous and a betrayal of their friendship, while she sees them as unwilling to accept her for what she is.  A ferociously smart film boasting sensitive direction, a fine script and miraculous casting (the actors who replace the girls when they drink from the flower are so perfectly cast your jaw drops), Girls Lost exists in the same fantasy allegory/sexual awakening realm as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Joachim Trier, whose first film Reprise won the Discovery prize at TIFF, has set his latest Louder than Bombs in a wealthy suburban/rural enclave in the eastern United States, but that comfort hasn’t isolated them from the agonies of an increasingly troubled world. Still grieving the death of his wife Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a famed photojournalist who routinely almost addictively travelled to hotspots around the globe, professor Gene Reed (Gabriel Byrne) is also concerned about the mind-set of his youngest son Conrad (Devin Druid, in a career making performance), who plays violent games online and is acting awfully twitchy. Gene thinks a surprise visit by his eldest son, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), now a father himself, will provide him with a window on Conrad’s mental state, but fatherhood has thrown Jonah for a loop and he has other things on his mind. 

Directed with all the subtlety and psychological insight one might expect from Trier, one of the finest young filmmakers working today, Louder than Bombs is a powerful exploration of the split between the home and the world, broader ethical and immediate domestic responsibilities. It also boasts some of the finest moments I’ve seen in any movie this year, including Jonah’s hilarious yet sad attempt to counsel his younger brother regarding his fixation on a cheerleader, and brilliant set of sequences where Trier contrasts Gene’s perspective on an event with Conrad’s – and which speaks volumes about parenting and generational divides.

The sense of a hostile but closed in environment is also present in Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick, about Charlotte (Ine Wilmann), a young dance instructor who is at loose ends. Her self-centered intellectual mother is dictatorial and profoundly uninterested in anyone else’s life, leaving her daughter to tend to her dying husband while she jets off to New York. Even Charlotte’s shrink cuts her off. Reunited with her half-brother, Charlotte finally finds the sense of home she’s been pining for but as they grow closer, they threaten to break some of society’s strongest taboos. Sewitsky directs with subtlety and courage while Wilmann gives one of the finest, gutsiest performances of the year.

Martin Zandvliet’s powerful historical drama Land of Mine, the opening night film for the first edition of TIFF’s Platform programme, like many of the films this year finds the countryside place where nations exact vengeance and blood for earlier wrongdoings but from those least involved and the most powerless. The film, which contains some of the most intense suspense scenes in any film at the Festival, recounts a little known episode in Danish history following World War II when the Danes and the Brits forced teenaged German soldiers to defuse the millions of bombs the Germans had festooned the Danish coast with. Exquisitely shot by Camilla Hjeld Knudsen, the film has a fine young cast as well as a no holds barred performance by Roland Møller as the sergeant who spends the most time with the terrified kids, whom they refer to as “volunteers” in duplicitous doublespeak worthy of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Little Bush himself. Zandvliet, who also made Applause, delivers possibly his most intense film to date, a fusion of The Hurt Locker and Flame & Citroen.

Of course, families also provide succour as well. Sanna Lenken’s feature debut the already critically lauded My Skinny Sister –screening at TIFF Kids -looks at the bond between two sisters, a bond threatened when one’s strange dietary habits threaten her health.

Finally, there’s Horizon, the latest from Icelandic master Fridrik Thór Fridriksson who’s co-directing with Bergur Bernburg.  Being both icon and iconoclast, Fridriksson bucks the prevailing trend by offering up a biography/ aesthetic defence of the celebrated Icelandic painter George Gudni, who began his career at the forefront of the more avant-garde practices of the 1980s but secretly began painting landscapes on the sly and almost single-handedly revitalising the form while gaining international recognition. Fridriksson and Bernburg beautifully recreate Gudni’s way of seeing, searching for ephemeral and the otherworldly in their visuals, and implicitly arguing that nature is one way we can actually glimpse or at least conceive of the eternal.”

Steve Gravestock