Icelandic film A White, White Day shifts from thriller to character study repeatedly. It is superb as the latter and adequate enough at the former for the suspense elements to add some juice to the script. The standout aspects here are the acting, the setting and the sharp, austere style of the cinematography.
A White, White Day revolves around Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a troubled police officer in a small, isolated Icelandic village. In the opening scene of the film, the viewer witnesses an obviously fatal car crash; that was Ingimundur’s wife. Losing his wife has unhinged him and made him prone to bouts of rage. It is only at this point in the story that the viewer is introduced to Ingimundur, after he has mostly mastered his grief and is working towards rehabilitating his life by remodeling a house for his adult daughter and her husband and children to move into.
His key relationship in the film is to his nine-year-old granddaughter Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir). She seems to understand him and provide him with an anchor to remain calm as he weathers the various ups and downs of widowerhood. Their connection in the film feels real, as if the two actors truly are grandfather and granddaughter to one another in real life. Sigurdsson’s acting throughout is stellar, but particularly as a convincing grandparent to an independent and precocious little girl. Salka is the pivotal point in the film as a character study of Ingimundur, as she brings out the best in him.
The other side of the film is the thriller aspect. Ingimundur becomes (correctly) convinced his wife was having an affair in the months prior to her death and he locates the man she was sleeping with. It is a small town, so the two men know each other. Ingimundur stalks his wife’s lover, but never confronts him, settling instead for a bit of extra starch when he tackles him in the local pickup soccer game. Of course, in the climax of the film, Ingimundur descends into one of his berserker rampages and decides that perhaps revenge on this man for cuckolding him is the appropriate way forward in dealing with his grief. As a thriller,A White, White Day never feels quite menacing enough to really come off—there are more laughs induced than nerves—but it does add dynamism to the stronger character-study aspect.
Iceland as a setting can be tricky for a film. It is a gorgeous and dramatic landscape of volcanoes, waterfalls and fjords with the sort of sea views to make real-estate tycoons swoon. So filmmakers working in Iceland have to make sure to not allow the landscape to overwhelm the film while also establishing a sense of place. To do this, A White, White Day develops its own device: it shows occasional minutes-long montages of the house that Ingimundur is renovating, with wild horses tramping in the foreground and mountains jutting up behind the house. Each montage has several short clips of the house in different seasons and each clip is several seconds long. Sometimes in a clip, the grass is green and the mountains clear, sometimes it is all snow or all fog and often the scene is in-between, with a horse or two grazing in the foreground while the mountains are still snowy behind. Through this clever cinematography, A White, White Day is firmly in Iceland without allowing the epic topography to out-muscle the plot.
While ostensibly a thriller, A White, White Day is less about the mechanics of the plot—Ingimundur’s drive for vengeance—and more about the soul of its protagonist. If anything, it is a hangout film, but one about an angry guy renovating a house in the middle of nowhere rather than something by Linklater with stoners discussing philosophy.
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