vincenthetreed

Inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurðsson) has to investigate a "messy and pointless" murder. A dirty old man has had his head bashed in in his flat. "Typical Icelandic", he thinks.

Iceland just touches the Arctic circle. It's a long way from anywhere else. It is grey and gritty, spectacular and melancholy, buffeted by blasts of wind, snow and steam. Against this background Erlendur doggedly untangles the connections and the crimes of the past, digging up corpses and secrets shameful or tragic. Landscape and society alike are revealed and commented on, drily and laconically.

Being based on a novel by Iceland's most successful crime writer, the characters are as well known to the home audience as Rebus, for instance, is in Britain, and carry enough of the baggage of real life to make them credible and sympathetic. There are visual themes of burials and exhumations, post-mortems, pathology labs and fast food, and a sound track of male voices shading into electronic moans and growls, which in turn dissolve into the wind. It's a very well-constructed package, which is thought provoking, gruesome, touching and funny, and it's certainly worth seeing.

I was persuaded to watch this film on late-night TV by the cast: Tim Robbins, Jodie Foster and John Turturro, and lots of familiar faces who you're glad to see, even if you don't know their names. Turturro is better in this than in most of his later work. Psycho? or just a stupid, unhappy bully, whose violence seems almost normal in the tough, white, working class neighbourhood which gives the film its title. He is genuinely threatening, mean, short fuse, unpredictable, but a believable rounded character who excites our pity as well as our disgust. Foster and Robbins fit their roles like fingers fit gloves, the period setting - 1964 - is nicely realised, and the script sets up and resolves a series of classic conflicts with some originality and some appealing off-the-wall subplots. Of course, the good end happily and the bad unhappily, but that is fiction, my dear, and that is why I call it a melodrama. If it comes up on the late-night schedules, or you see it in your local video-store, watch it.