The Icelandic tourist board may never recover from Jar City, a gloomy, riveting police thriller that might as well come with billboards instructing would-be travellers to abandon all hope. Forget geysers and painfully hip bars with Sigur Rós on the jukebox. In director Baltasar Kormákur’s international hit, Reykjavik has never looked less appealing.
Welcome to a sprawl of mucky flats that would have been rejected on aesthetic grounds by the most corrupt eastern bloc town planner, a place where sheep’s head in a bag is a local fast-food delicacy, a country where a registrar dismisses the blank on a birth certificate where the father’s name ought to be. “Probably incest or rape,” she shrugs.
This mottled backdrop serves the plot, a sort of CSI Reykjavik with darker, wider implications, exceptionally well. As the film opens, the delightfully gruff Inspector Erlendur (the excellent Ingvar E.Sigurdsson) is at a murder scene which, he claims wearily, is typically Icelandic in that it’s “messy and pointless”. The killing, in the way of these things, masks a much larger conspiracy, and our hero soon uncovers a decades old case of small town police corruption, rape allegations and a bizarre series of genetic clues. Elsewhere, in keeping with the sunlight deprivation, a young father frantically researches the death of his five-year-old daughter.
Pounding runabouts and fast cross-cuts between these two narrative strands will suit fans of either Infernal Affairs or Se7en nicely. Forensic junkies, meanwhile, will undoubtedly enjoy the vast organ storage facility of the title.
It is, however, the bleak exoticism of the locale that elevates Jar City beyond clever genre mechanics. If you see only one grim Icelandic police procedural this year, etc. etc.