Avis des critiques

On a character level, “Winter Brothers” is only arresting in individual moments: a brutally staged brawl in the buff between Johan and Emil, or Emil sweetly performing a trick of chemistry for Anna. Mr. Palmason’s showy technique, magnetic on its own, ultimately seems like a way of adding mystery to a story that, like Emil, is content with having no place to go.

Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings; his impression-based approach doesn’t exactly serve well a potentially pivotal but vaguely treated secondary character like Anna (or even Johan, who, title aside, doesn’t leave much of a mark). But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.

The film’s formal compositions and clangy sound design heighten a tone of absurdist banality, while Hove’s passion gives Emil a necessary, and excruciating, humanity.

The film was created on location (written, rehearsed, and with the editor on set) as per a methodology of immersion dear to visual artist turned filmmaker Pálmason. An expatriate in Denmark, Pálmason seemingly reproduces in his work a process of electing a new place and making it his own, after stripping it from too recognizable attributes. And indeed, an acute sense of space and texture (ice, chalk, wood) helps involve us in the ritualistic life that so maddens Emil.

Chilly scenes of workplace discord dominate Winter Brothers (Vinterbrodre), a confidently handled, promisingly edgy feature debut from Copenhagen-based, Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Palmason... While impressive in parts, the picture oscillates between the profitably enigmatic and the frustratingly obtuse.

The process of caulking in its narrative gaps might be frustrating for some, and there are certainly flourishes, such as Emil's magic tricks, that don't seem to add anything but another knot to the tangle. But while we may not always know what Pálmason means, there's the undeniable sense that _he_ does, and mostly, that's enough to add up to an impressively original, auspiciously idiosyncratic debut.