Jar City

It's grim up North, in Baltasar Kormákur's dour, brooding and atmospheric Icelandic murder mystery. His Iceland is not the modish, forward-thinking home of free central heating, indie music and the Northern Lights (which is partly showcased in his 2000 101 Reykjavik). Instead the country emerges as a hardy, inward-looking and secretive society torn between old and new values, whose inhabitants' unsightly secrets can be unmasked through their distinctive genetic heritage, stored in a (real-life) database, holding the whole population's medical records.
Adapting Arnaldur Indridason's successful crime novel, Kormákur is visibly fascinated by this database, for it offers his characters a veritable cornucopia of clues, moral dilemmas and devastating truths. It allows the dyspeptic Inspector Erlendur to unearth 30-year old crimes after the seemingly everyday killing of elderly ne'er-do-well Holberg, and prompts Orn, a young father agonised over the inherited brain condition that is killing his daughter, to a series of terrible deeds. And it's this skilled exploitation of the explosive possibilities of the Icelandic high-tech hall of secrets, alongside a sly, rather mordant assertion that historical isolation has bred an Icelandic national taste for taciturn stoicism (and sheep's head as fast-food) that makes one forgiving of Jar City's narrative shortcomings.
Anyone familiar with the classier end of British or US TV police procedurals can see the intertwining of Orn and Holdberg's stories coming a country mile away. With its melancholy tone, foot-slogging police work and misanthropic hero ("Another typical Icelandic murder - shitty and pointless"), Jar City is a cinematic Inspector Norse, right down to its insistent, well-trodden themes of how the past infects the present through genetic and emotional inheritances. Nonetheless Kormákur's decision to concentrate on the police grunt work (Erlendur's team toil through a search for rape perpetrators from 30 years ago, for example) gives the movie a homely, trudging tone which sets it usefully apart from slicker Hollywood fare. It also melds neatly with the film's insistent bird's-eye views of the odd, anti-beauty of the Icelandic landscape, a rocky, geyser-pocked wasteland lashed by rain and snow. In fact, the film's downright disinterest in conventional aesthetics, as the crumpled, beardy Erlendur and his distinctly plain sidekicks wend their way through ugly post-war buildings, dilapidated interiors and Reykjavik's grey, weather-blasted suburbs, complements the unlovely, exhumed truths of Orn and Erlendur's searches most effectively. The filmisn't always deft (there's a sudden, disconcerting eruption of flashback in the last act to synch the two story strands) but it's never less than thoughtful.
As is the snuffling, beady-eyed performance of Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, whose dogged, cynical detective drags the story on like a husky. His Erlunder mixes tenacity with flashes of tenderness that lend that common trope of crime thrillers - the policeman's ambivalent relationship with his own wayward child - with a pleasingly gruff poignancy. Carrying his drug-addled, pregnant daughter away from a junkie squat as impassively as if she were a truant toddler, he provides a moment more eloquent about the parent-child link, than anything that the Icelandic Genetic Research database could reveal.