RAMS (Grímur Hákonarson). Subtitled. 93 minutes. Opens Friday (February 12). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Rams is set in a small Icelandic village where middle-aged brothers Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) raise their sheep on opposite sides of the same farm. They take the animals into town for fairs and sales. They share custody of a border collie. They haven’t spoken to each other in decades.
When a pestilence spreads through the valley, requiring everyone’s livestock to be slaughtered, one brother complies while the other doesn’t, leading to escalating tensions with the authorities – and between the siblings.
Writer/director Grímur Hákonarson starts his movie as an observational absurdist comedy but develops it into something far richer. He uses echoing imagery and his actors’ physicality to create drama with minimal dialogue, showing how the brothers’ rift has defined their entire adult lives without ever explaining how it started or why it persists.
But of course we don’t really need that information it’s etched in the faces of Sigurjónsson and Júlíusson, veteran Icelandic actors virtually unknown to North American audiences. The brothers’ weariness, their bleary eyes, their practised movements around one another – these things form the undertow that pulls Rams toward its strange, lovely climax.
Hákonarson achieves it all with such grace you might not even notice what’s happening.
