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JAR CITY
Running time 93 minutes
Directed by Baltásar Kormákur
Written by Arnaldur Indriöason
Starring Ingvar E. Sigurōsson
Baltásar Kormákur’s Jar City is based on the Icelandic best seller Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indriöason. For those of us, like me, who know next to nothing about Iceland or the Icelandic cinema, Jar City is an absorbingly revelatory experience, and one of the most mesmerizing movies of the year. It is an often gruesome crime story by the director of 101 Reykjavik and two other prizewinners abroad, none of which I have seen.
Police inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurōsson) is called on to investigate the murder of an elderly man found dead in his basement. With a disgusted expression of weary insularity, Erlendur deplores both the crime and the crime scene as “a typical Icelandic murder: messy and pointless.” The inspector seems to be in a perpetually foul mood, having to deal with a wayward, drug-addicted, promiscuous daughter; old cases of police malfeasance; and a genetic mystery implicating the entire Icelandic nation in the depredations of a rampant racist who has been frequently arrested but never convicted. This leads to many openings of coffins and the tracking down of a stolen brain to a national repository of body parts, known as “Jar City.”
The acting of a wide spectrum of Icelandic performers is first rate, as Mr. Kormákur’s film traverses large swatches of this curiously self-aware country under persistently dismal skies and wintry landscapes. Nonetheless, Jar City is mandatory viewing for reasons both aesthetic and ethnographic.
