Thursday, October 17, 2019

31 Days of Halloween: I Remember You

2017, Óskar Thór Axelsson (Black's Game) -- download

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).


This is an Icelandic mystery wrapped in the shroud OF a ghost story that is as much about the loneliness of isolation as it is about death and ghosts. The movie is broken into two stories, one involving three young people who move to an isolated island to renovate an abandoned house, the other about Freyr, a doctor helping the police investigate a mysterious, disturbing murder with connections to a missing boy.

The structure of the story telling came in the style of a familiar Scandinavian murder mystery, all dark & broody, with a weight of emotion about it. The ghost makes an appearance almost immediately, and through it we learn of tragedy and connection and loss. Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Atomic Blonde), who suffered his own loss years prior helps the police investigate a series of suicides & deaths linked to an older crime. As he digs further, he is more & more haunted by what he learns, both figuratively and literally. On the other story, the three renovators suffer their own haunting, as one, Katrin, recently lost a baby. She is haunted by her grief, until more than that manifests.

This kind of story comes with an unravelling, one that wants you to revisit the tropes. It ended with a twist, that while not entirely unforeseen, was a rather nice conclusion to lots of cliches.

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