Whether you see it as a violent and disturbing expose of disaffected and marginalized youth or an ethereal fairytale based on premonition and dream logic, for good or bad, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is not a film you will soon forget. Taking place among the poor and forgotten of Icelandic society, it paints a grim picture of life on an island country often painted as an idyllic tourist destination. Guðmundsson’s Iceland runs in direct contradiction to this serenity, unapologetically demonstrating that poverty and abuse exist in even the most idealized places on earth.
Dwelling somewhere in the dark spaces between A Clockwork Orange and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Beautiful Beings is at times almost unbearable to watch. Its main characters walk an ever-changing line between compassion and savagery, often with the former outwardly manifesting as the latter. This dynamic creates a sense of menace and dread that’s hard to shake, even when it’s clear that these boys are all each other has. When something bad happens to one (and it does plenty of times), they band together with an inspiring amount of fellowship, even if their formula for justice isn’t much more than poorly-planned acts of spontaneous violence.
However, wedged into this brutal narrative are a few moments of pure wonder. These welcomed respites reveal themselves as beautifully rendered supernatural visions and dream sequences that might be considered nightmarish if they weren’t so exquisitely mystical. These psychic phenomena are hinted at early, but don’t appear until well into the film, causing them feel somewhat out of place. But once these uncanny apparitions have had some time to settle in and become part of the film’s mythology, they’re nothing short of spectacular, if creepy, displays of pure magic that elevate Beautiful Beings to a level beyond the dismal severity of its principal narrative.
Originally published by ASHEVILLE MOVIES.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.