You know that movie where a couple whose marriage is on the rocks ends up staying in an unnerving location that turns out to be haunted, either by spirits or the couple’s own neuroses? Well, Icelandic filmmaker Anton Sigurdsson’s 2016 directorial debut Graves & Bones is that movie, and as examples of the sub-genre go it’s not bad, though the more familiar elements of the plot as well as some issues with storytelling sadly undermine the tension and drama.
As the movie opens, we meet dodgy Reykjavik businessman Gunnar (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) and his wife Sonja (Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir), anxiously awaiting the outcome of an appeal he has lodged against a conviction for financial wrongdoing. The details of the case are never made entirely clear, but he’s a prominent enough figure for the story to have made it into the tabloids. Meanwhile, Gunnar’s brother — also connected to the business — has killed himself, leaving his young daughter Perla (Elva María Birgisdóttir) an orphan, so when Gunnar and Sonja have to make the journey into the remote countryside to collect her, it’s part mission of mercy and part escape. This is complicated even further by the fact that the couple lost their own daughter, which severely compromised the couple’s relationship. It’s implied that their marriage had barely began to recover when Gunnar became mired in scandal. After a long drive across beautifully bleak Iceland, the couple arrives at the house, but from the first encounter with reluctant caretaker Fannar (Magnús Jónsson) it’s clear that something is amiss. The couple intends of course to stay only for one night but are in fact stranded there for the weekend when – who’d have thought it? – their car refuses to start.
So far, so familiar, but the movie has several things going for it. First is its setting. There’s a chilly tension in the isolated, middle-of-nowhere location, and the cottage, theoretically a bulwark of warmth and comfort against the barren wintry grandeur of the Icelandic landscape, feels claustrophobic and illogical in the classic haunted house style. The setting serves to bring the couple – who it seems, could probably do with some time apart – uncomfortably close, and unnerving occurrences heighten the distance that has grown between them.
Sonja quickly bonds with the slightly creepy Perla, but Gunnar is essentially – and believably – immersed in his own guilt and misery and is at best distracted by the situation at the house. Events escalate, Gunnar is attacked, Perla’s cat is killed etc., and it becomes clear that there are other entities present. Somewhat belatedly, Fannar tells the couple about the troubled history of the house, and the question becomes whether Gunnar’s brother’s suicide was less to do with the brothers’ troubles and more to do with the house, being a kind of echo of older events. And, more pressingly, will Gunnar, Sonja and Perla fall victim to the house’s past in the same way? Blah blah – you’ve probably seen it all before and done better too – but although less intriguing than it thinks it is, at least the story isn’t boring.
Graves & Bones holds the attention thanks especially to nice performances by the two leads and a genuine and sometimes powerful atmosphere of cold and spectral misery. There are distant echoes of many better movies, not least Don’t Look Now and The Shining, but it’s by design a far more modest film than those. Had Sigurdsson pared it down even further and suggested more but stated less, this could have been a sinister little gem, but as it is, it’s all a bit confused and muddled and at times alarmingly handled, with new characters appearing in unnecessary flashbacks without warning. It also has a twist ending which is entirely predictable but goes too far, not so much pulling the rug out from under the viewer as from under the story – making it all seem much sillier than necessary. But if low-key horror is your kind of thing, it’s a nice-looking and mostly gripping hour and 22 minutes with an unfamiliar setting and some effectively chilling moments.
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