When people think of Iceland, most people think of the label "tourist destination", and few people think of its movies.
Icelandic cinema is indeed a niche compared to other countries in northern Europe.
But in recent years, Icelandic cinema has received more and more attention.
Especially in 2015, the Icelandic film industry ushered in a big explosion.
The films "Ram", "Sparrow" and "Virgin Mountain" that emerged this year won many international awards.
At this year's Cannes Film Festival, Icelandic films also appeared.
A fantasy thriller, "The Sheep Cub", was shortlisted for a kind of attention unit at the 74th Cannes Film Festival.
The story of this movie revolves around a "sheep child".
In Iceland, a strange thing happened to a shepherd couple while delivering a ewe in their home.
This ewe was born of a cub, half human and half sheep.
It has the head of a sheep, but has a human body.
The couple once lost a child, and the pain of losing a child made them cherish this "sheep child" especially.
Especially the wife, she simply regards this "sheep child" as her own.
After carrying her home, his wife patiently fed her, often holding her and not letting go, and gave her a name called "Ada".
However, the wife's maternal love has sustenance, and Ida's biological mother has no children.
Ida's mother often wandered outside the couple's door, and the wife was very worried, so she rushed to drive away the ewe.
But what she feared most was happening.
One day, the couple returned home to find Ida missing.
The couple was in a hurry, and they immediately rushed out of the house and looked for them separately.
Finally on a hillside, I found Ida.
And at Ida's side was her biological mother.
The couple took Ida into their arms, turned their heads and left.
Ida's birth mother watched her child being taken away again, screaming and chasing after her.
At this point, the wife turned around and shouted angrily at the ewe, "Go away", and the ewe stopped.
Bringing Ada home again, the family returned to a warm atmosphere.
But Ida's birth mother became a knot in her wife's heart, and she often had nightmares, in which the sheep stared at her deadly, and such a look made her sleepless.
Coupled with the fact that Ida's birth mother often appeared near her house, she was determined to make a settlement for fear of losing Ida's wife again.
She picked up the shotgun and aimed it at Ida's birth mother.
After a gunshot, the wife felt that Ida would always belong to her.
Unfortunately, she thought that doing so would bring lasting peace and joy to their families, but she did not know that what she had done had attracted an unknown force of terror that would destroy them.
The process of the wife killing the ewe was seen by the husband's brother.
The younger brother meets Ada, who is a little older, and she is dressed as a child, eating with them and bathing together.
The younger brother felt that everything in front of him was too weird, this was clearly a monster, but he was treated as a baby by his brother-in-law.
He asked his brother what Ida was, and he replied—
happiness.
The younger brother still did not understand the mentality of his brother and sister-in-law, and while they were asleep, he took Ida out of the house and took a shotgun.
The younger brother wants to solve this monster.
But in the end, he still couldn't get his hands on it.
After a struggle, his brother's attitude towards Ida also took a one hundred and eighty-degree turn.
He accepted Ida as a family member and often took her out to play as if she were his niece.
Until one day, the arrival of an unidentified species shattered the tranquility of the home.
The unidentified species did not show his face, only to hear him gasping for breath.
Both Ida and the family's shepherd saw him, and the sheepdog pounced on him, and Ida seemed to realize something, and her eyes fluctuated, and then she turned and ran back home.
In the kitchen, the husband's brother is furious with his wife.
Although the film does not explain the previous history of the two, through several conversations when they were alone, you can feel that there has been an unrequited love between them.
After being rejected, his brother threatened her with the fact that his wife had killed the ewe.
The wife was afraid that her brother would tell him about it, so she pretended to agree to his request.
Then, when they were intimate, they took the opportunity to lock their brother in the storage room.
After some thought, the wife decided to send her brother away in order not to expose the matter.
After my brother left, my wife felt much more relaxed.
As she was driving home, her husband noticed that the dog was missing, so he took Ida out to look for it.
As a result, the mysterious unknown species that gasped for breath appeared.
This time, he finally appeared in his real body.
Like Ida, he was half man and half sheep.
He was Ida's biological father.
He raised his gun to his husband and pulled the trigger, who collapsed in a pool of blood.
And he took Ada's hand and took Ida away.
Seeing all this, the wife was in pain.
She lost her husband, lost her dog, and lost Ida.
No amount of tears she shed would help.
At the end of the film, the wife stands alone in the wilderness, looks up at the sky, and sighs a long time...
After watching the whole movie, a strong sense of allegory came to the face.
The wife took Ida away, an act like a human being recklessly plundering everything he wanted from nature. In the end, the wife loses everything, and nature's counterattack is so powerful that it makes human beings despair.
Unlike ordinary thrillers, the genre elements of this film are very weak, there is no strong dramatic conflict, and the sense of thriller is all blessed by the unique atmosphere that Iceland brings.
In this sparsely populated land, the fog, wilderness, mountains, and the feeling of slaughter make the whole film covered with a mysterious temperament.
However, because of this, the storyline is weak, and the practice of always relying on the atmosphere to take the tone also brings a strong sense of "loading x" to the film.
The story that can be told in 30 minutes is made into a feature film, and a large number of empty mirrors make the film look very boring.
Of course, this movie is not without any highlights except for "loading x", and the biggest highlight of this movie is its interpretation space.
Ostensibly, this is a parable about "man and nature."
But in fact, the film has a mythical color from beginning to end.
The half-human, half-sheep species that appear in real form at the end have appeared at the beginning.
At first, with a rough breath, the sheep began to panic.
Then a ewe came out and lay on the ground, as if sacrificial, and only then was Ada born.
In some film reviews, there are also interpretations that correspond to pan gods with the half-human, half-sheep ram and the husband's brother.
But even so, this movie can hardly be called a good film, but it can only be said to be a big Icelandic film with a bit of deciphering space in the pretense.
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