Gonoszság

You don’t get to offend Icelandic cinematography in front of me, which is something that other reviewers here should know already and spare me their scathing remarks about how Icelanders need to learn filmmaking. They know how to make films. For their overall population of some 300,000, they make quite a lot of movies, and a good percentage of those are high-quality. Only in this case, Cruelty was a bit punishing as far as the police’s naivety goes. It is no wonder when there’s a murder in Iceland once in a blue moon. The cops are degenerates and they don’t know how to investigate. And so, they accused every single local lunatic. They called them up one by one and forced them to admit to something they haven’t done. I had the feeling that this movie wasn’t really about investigating, which is nonexistent, but about people and their feelings, which it was so much better at. The issue is, however, that it’s seemingly a crime investigation, but it just doesn’t work as such. The ending was really good, but it didn’t explain the murders at all. It was a good drama, but a bad crime investigation movie. (2017.08.20)