Jar City

Screened at the 2007 Telluride Film Festival

Jar City came pitched as an X-Files/CSI-style mystery, but it turned out to be distressingly straightforward. The film, from acclaimed Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur, blows a lot of smoke, but once it clears there’s not much left, and the story putters to an unsatisfying conclusion. When I caught up to the plot, which happened about an hour in, my heart sank as I realized that the secrets the movie worked so hard to conceal are overwrought and simply not that interesting.

All may have been forgiven had Jar City provided an effective hour of what-the-hell-is-going-on suspense. But as it happens, its suspense mechanics are kind of clumsy too: at one point, the screenplay fractures its chronology out of nowhere, presumably because that was the most convenient way to reveal what it wanted to reveal when it wanted to reveal it — and the movie lost what rhythm it had managed to build up.

As part of a concerted effort to see Telluride movies cold this year, I went into Jar City knowing nothing, and the experience was strange: unaware of where the film was headed, the events — involving the death of a young girl and a seemingly unrelated murder — took on a “So What?” quality that belied the apocalyptically gloomy atmosphere. There’s talk about a nationwide genetic database and the threat of privacy invasion, but this is such an insignificant part of the plot that it seems like a strange subtext. I couldn’t shake the impression that the film’s theatrics were much ado about nothing.

What’s much more interesting is the film’s style — I hear that Iceland is a beautiful country, but you wouldn’t know it from Jar City, which paints it in unrelentingly drab, bleak colors — the movie is cold, uncomfortable, unsettling. When the plot turns baroque, with exhumed corpses and brains in jars front and center, the film doesn’t even break stride. Add a wry sense of gallows humor, and you have the makings of a terrific noir — if only the story itself packed more of a punch.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2007
Starring:	Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Þorsteinn Gunnarsson, Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir
Directed by:	Baltasar Kormákur
Rated:	NR