A Ilha do Diabo

Alright so I may be biased since I played "Dick" in the movie (2 lines, Woo Hoo!!) but I definitely liked it. Although the characters sometimes seemed like caricatures you have to remember that they were trying to distill an entire nation's attitudes down into a few people. The movie is not exactly uplifting but it is well done. The acting is quality and Fridrik Thor's directing is on par with his Oscar nominated "Children of Nature."

Poor families In the barrack district in Reykjavik in 50's. Mother who gets married and moves to America leaving her children. Grown-up boy sticking around with his gang and violence. His younger brother with bad self-confidence and the tragedy, which wakes up his wild brother to consider of his own life. The film is full of tragedies, miserable and disparate people. But, so amazing, the film ends peacefully with "Charles Chaplin" and the opera singing boy. This ending doesn't however let the audiences forget what happened with the family before, and even though, you get hope of bright future of the family. Very unique film with any possible elements of life. The Icelandic language spies the film too with its beautiful sounds.

I go out of my way to view foreign/independent film (I know, we're a vanishing breed) and rented this video at a neighborhood store that has a pretty good foreign selection mostly on the power of having seen COLD FEVER, which I enjoyed.

While I appreciate "dark comedies" as much as the next person -- and am a huge fan of Aki Kurasmaki (so I have some familiarity of Scandinavian film sensibility) -- it was a mistake to have placed so much of the film's success around a character as thoroughly unlikable as Baddi.

While he dominates the screen with charmless, witless and appalling behavior that knows no bounds (premised on his contact with "America"), most of the other characters are used as props and are nobly antithetical, i.e., they have a conscience. But for the most part, as a whole they cannot counterbalance the effect that the Baddi character has on the film.

That is a shame because there appeared to be some good potential character driven aspects to the story that were wasted.

I have to disagree with the user that commented on the movie above me. You might think that this is my opinion as an Icelander, but this is truly my honest opinion from a motion picture point of view.

This story probably captures Icelandic viewers born from 1900 - 1950 even better than the rest, since they might remember this peculiar scenario, where the poor people of the country lived in US/UK military cabins. This story realistically describes life in those days if you had little financial capabilities and lived in Iceland, which took a big leap in that time frame in regards of technology and thinking. Actors put on quite a show, and the characters are of such variations that almost everyone can relate to some of them, whether if it's yourself or somebody you know.

I don't know why the other critic claimed that he didn't care whether the characters lived or died, but it seems to me that he wasn't really paying attention to the movie. I don't know if it's because it's mainly in Icelandic, or because of another reason (maybe not subtitled), but I recommend this movie to anyone who likes good movies that are not typical Hollywood movies.

Cheers.

This movie is a good, 'gritty' film, about a lower class family going through major cultural shock. Chances are you don't speak icelandic (I don't) but subtitled it flowed very well. It's not hollywood like, it goes a bit slower than your average film, but they use that time to develop the characters and to get you emotionally involved.