27/03/2025 - Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon’s slow-paced fiction feature explores ultimate solitude and the liminal space between active life and the threshold of death

Despite death being something that is bound to happen to all of us, it has paradoxically become a frightening taboo in our predominantly secular Western civilisation – perhaps because all narratives of the afterlife have been relegated to the realm of esoteric beliefs, making the end of life synonymous with the terrifying abyss of nothingness for rational thinkers.

No wonder, then, that those living out their final days often feel extremely lonely; the topic is typically avoided unless addressed by specialists handling it in a “professional manner”. Icelandic director Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon, however, bravely stares death right in the eyes through the sorrowful trajectory of his main character, who seems to be in a state between sleep and wakefulness, and is living his twilight days. Fearless, poetic and merciless in its depiction of the inevitable, Epilogues [+see also:
interview: Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon
film profile] has just been screened in the pan-European Smart 7 programme of the Vilnius International Film Festival and stands out as one of the few profound takes on the foreboding of death in contemporary European cinema.

An unnamed old man (Þorsteinn Gunnarsson) has just lost his wife (Guðrún Gísladóttir) and finds himself sinking into an all-consuming loneliness. After a bleak beginning – marked by his insomniac episodes, her funeral and her cremation, after which he brings the urn home and starts making tea with her ashes – his real nightmares begin. He wakes up at night, wanders around the empty house, and sees her dressing in front of the mirror, sitting at the piano or using the sewing machine to put name tags on his clothes. He tries to connect with her as if she had never left, only to lose her again. Memories and cravings, dreams and reality, intertwine in a somewhat hallucinogenic journey.

Meanwhile, his voice has started trembling from lack of conversation, as a somewhat blunt doctor points out, suggesting that he get a dog. Somewhere in the middle, there is a brief moment of brightness when his neighbour (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) tries to cheer him up – inviting him to dinner or taking him to yoga classes in the swimming pool. But when the neighbour’s wife dies, too, even the black humour at the moment of choosing the right coffin fails to dispel the overwhelming sense of despair.

Based on the novella of the same name by acclaimed Icelandic writer Guðbergur Bergsson, Epilogues follows the literary structure by being divided into chapters, and builds a hopeless narrative of grief and solitude – not due to imposed pessimism, but through its frank depiction of the end of one’s life in a pragmatic, modern world. It is less about concrete events and more about capturing a condition of body and mind – a mission that delves into the core of emotional states, oscillating between restlessness and apathy, anxiety and melancholy, the longing for one more radiant day and the depths of grim self-pity, the desire to live and the desire to die.

To convey these emotions, the film makes full use of DoP Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s discreet and meticulous camerawork, with every frame infused with the intent to outspeak the unspeakable. In the end, rather than making the viewer depressed, Epilogues leaves one quiet and humble, as if after a sermon – its message transcending the here and now, reaching into eternity.

Epilogues was produced by Iceland’s Icelandic Film Corporation and Spellbound Productions, Norway’s Evil Doghouse, and Belgium’s Harald House.