Beautiful Beings

Suburban Reykjavík in the early 2000s. Addi and his friends are fourteen, fifteen, and nobody is paying attention to them. They take in Balli after he is badly beaten at school. Violence starts as play and becomes the group's language. Meanwhile Addi is dealing with strange waking visions. His mother has them too. Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson writes and directs. Birgir Dagur Bjarkason plays Addi and Áskell Einar Pálmason plays Balli, with Aníta Briem and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson in support. The Icelandic title, Berdreymi, does not translate cleanly. It means someone whose dreams show the future. That is where the film's strand of the uncanny comes from, and it sits inside an otherwise realist story without ever being explained. The cinematographer is Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, who shot Victoria in 2015 in a single take. It screened in the Panorama section at the 2022 Berlinale and won the Europa Cinemas Label, and became Iceland's Oscar submission for 2023. Who it is for: viewers drawn to Nordic films about adolescence, and to the question of how male violence is learned. Who it is not for: the beatings are genuinely brutal and the film holds them, and the business of the visions is never resolved.