Shot in steely blues and grays, Baltasar
Kormákur's frigid film noir Jar City transplants the police procedural to the land of
the midnight sun. The story, taken from a popular crime novel by Arnaldur Indridason, hits too many familiar beats, but
Kormákur flavors his familiar dish with beauty shots of Iceland's pitted
landscape and the occasional cooked sheep's head.
The first body that turns up onscreen isn't the
elderly lowlife whose murder prompts the film's central investigation; it's a
little girl, laid naked on a slab after dying from a rare genetic disease. That
arresting image sets a stage for a story that turns on tortured family
relationships and the rot that's passed from one generation to the next. (The
movie's original title is Tainted Blood.)
Upon first sight of the murder victim whom the
film does focus on, detective Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson
doesn't bother to conceal his weary resignation. "A typical Iceland murder," he
says. "Messy and pointless." But a photograph of a 4-year-old girl's grave
marker, taped to the bottom of a locked drawer, leads the police to a pair of
deaths 30 years in the past: the girl's, apparently of natural causes, and her
mother's suicide. As he literally exhumes the past, uncovering evidence of what
may be a long-buried conspiracy involving a crooked small-town cop and "the
most notorious manic in Iceland," Sigurdsson
is also struggling with decay in his own family. His drug-addicted daughter
(Águsta Eva Erlendsdóttir) announces she's pregnant, begs him for money, and,
when that fails, moves into his bachelor flat.
Kormákur wrings the occasional moment of black
humor from the generally dour proceedings: When Sigurdsson
researches the dead girl's parentage, he finds her father's name has been left
off the records, which he's told occurs in one of three cases: "rape, incest,
or a foreigner." But his bumbling partner (Björn Hylnur Haraldsson) is a rote irritation. Kormákur gives signs of trying to rethink the genre, but he's
starting too far down the line. Eventually, some mysteries become clear, but
Kormákur's attempts to be crafty are too often clumsy, and the movie's
unmotivated time leaps are close to a cheat. Jar City makes a game try at building a new house from old lumber,
but the rot is already in the wood.