Ormens väg på hälleberget

I can't believe I've waited this long to see "Ormens väg på hälleberget"! I've seen it at the video store for years but I haven't gotten around to renting it until just now when I realized that Stellan Skarsgård was in it. Naturally, I should have rented it a long time ago since the great Bo Widerberg directed it, but well... I rented it now.

I was certainly not disappointed by the film. I thought it was quite brilliant, but it was also a harrowing experience to watch it. Stellan Skarsgård's character Karl Orsa really was a despicable person and the pain he caused Tea and her family -- while telling himself that he was "not a bad person" -- is unbelievable. I have no idea what any reviewers thought when this film was released in Sweden in 1986, but I think it's a very good film, quite brilliant. And the cast is very interesting -- at least if you're Swedish: Stina Ekblad, Stellan Skarsgård, Tomas von Brömssen, Reine Brynolfsson, Pernilla August (then Östergren), Ernst Günther, and Pernilla Wahlgren (yes, it's the Pernilla you think it is) plus Johan Widerberg and Melinda Kinnaman in (very) small parts... all in the same film! It's worth watching it only because of that, but as I said: the film is really good in its own right and I highly recommend it. (8/10)

Read the book. It is probably the best book Torgny Lindgren has written, and he has written many great books. Sadly, the film is a disaster. Worst of all is that the whole cast, who are supposedly portraying people in Northern Sweden (Västerbotten, to be more specific) in the19th century, are speaking with Stockholm accents. It takes away all credibility and makes a complete mockery of the story.

It's hard to understand how a normally more than competent director and some of Sweden's best actors have managed to fail so completely in bringing a fantastic story to the screen. Just avoid this film. Please. Read the book instead. It's brilliant.

In the 1880's, poverty-struck northern rural Sweden, a widow and her family is tormented by a despicable landholder/merchant who demands that the lease for their house, is to be paid in sexual favors once they can't afford the monetary one.

A very strong, simple basic story of old-time oppression, poverty and evil, is inexplicably mauled by a frustrating editing chopfest-technique (title cards, short take, cut - title cards, short take, cut... etc.) one expects to find only in a butcher shop. It's nearly impossible to connect with any character fully, by this type of storytelling and minimal dialog.

Also, because of the limited and claustrophobic setting, the endlessly repetitive dark and murky misery almost becomes a parody of poor rural folk suffering & drudgery in itself: By the umpteenth time bad guy Skarsgård enters the log cabin and wheezes: "It's time to talk about the lease", I'm actually laughing in the midst of deep tragedy - and THAT is a huge problem for any filmmaker. And do we have to read the book to find out what the fudge exactly happens in the (is it metaphorical?) end? Against this, the memorable performances by Ekblad, Skarsgård and Brynolfsson fight as fruitlessly as their characters against a perpetual winter. Sadly, supposedly a top filmmaker's worst movie.

My tip: for better depictions of my countrymen's gripping fates from this time period, check out Jan Troell's "The emigrants"!

3 out 10 from Ozjeppe.