The Oath (2016)

Original title: Eiðurinn

Finnur (Baltasar Kormákur) is a successful surgeon with what appears to be a happy and satisfied family life. However, ever since his daughter Anna (Hera Hilmar) has gotten together with her new boyfriend Óttar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), things have grown ever tenser. Óttar, you see, is involved in the drug trade, and the easy supply and closeness to that trade has gotten Anna hooked on drugs rather seriously, with a future as a proper junkie basically guaranteed if nothing happens quickly. Finnur is convinced that if he could only get Óttar out of Anna’s life, he could help her turn things around. But Óttar is not listening to reason anymore than Anna is, he’s not taking bribes, and when Finnur’s increasingly desperate attempts to somehow get rid of the younger man lead to the loss of a considerable amount of drugs, Óttar is starting to become violent and threatening himself. So what’s a surgeon to do? Kidnap the boyfriend, drug him and chain him to a radiator in a house out in the boons, apparently, putting the boy on ice until Finnur can decide if he can actually bring himself to commit murder.

Baltasar Kormákur is a strange director, with a filmography that seems harshly separated into crap big budget action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, impressive Human against Nature epics, and small, weird, off-beat black comedies with a deep noirish streak. The Oath is closest to that last strain in the director’s oeuvre, though it’s not really a comedy anymore but a psychological thriller whose few moments of comedy are so dark, one can’t help but look at oneself askance for laughing. For the most part, this is a thriller in the same vein as many a French genre entry from the 80s or 90s, less concerned with the actual mechanics of viscerally exciting an audience than with painting a detailed portrait of bourgeois people confronted with some kind of situation bringing them to emotional or intellectual extremes (which you can read as certainly running parallel to the director’s Human against Nature films, if you care to). In The Oath’s case, that extreme is more of a moral nature, the titular oath being the Hippocratic one and its insistence on doing no harm working counter to what the protagonist genuinely believes is necessary to protect the person he loves most in life.

To make Finnur’s dilemma work on more than a mere intellectual level, Kormákur portrays his relationship to Anna and his wife Solveig (Margrét Bjarnadóttir) not as you’d expect with the kind of treacly sweetness you get whenever dear Liam Neeson needs to save his little girl (bless him) but in a somewhat distanced and clinical manner that never feels as if it wants to press the audience into sharing his protagonists feelings but rather attempts to detail and explain them, so we can understand where Finnur is coming from even though we do not feel as he does. Pulling this off – and Kormákur does indeed pull it off – means the film has to be a master class on the telling detail, showing the inner lives of a family through a series of controlled and meaningful gestures rather than exposition.


Kormákur’s own performance in the lead role does add considerable dimension here, a degree of cold detachment actually convincing me more of the reality of Finnur’s character and situation than even the greatest scenery chewing could have. Finnur’s an interesting character, clearly priding himself on the detachment of the surgeon, trying to keep the kind of rational control over his surroundings that most of us learn early on is only achievable under the luckiest of circumstances, and only for a very short time. The film also realizes how basically self-centred Finnur’s approach to the situation is, even when we overlook how morally wrong his acts are. This thing is supposed to be all about the happiness and the future of his daughter, but in the end, he makes it all about himself, his inner struggle, his willingness to overthrow his beliefs. He doesn’t even realize the saddest thing about the relationship between Anna and Óttar (something the film understands very well): that these two are genuinely in love with each other; it’s just that it’s a love that most probably will kill Anna and ironically does kill Óttar in the end.

Mortal Engines (2018)

Welcome to yet another version of the post-apocalypse. This time around, the post-apocalyptic wastelands are roamed not by new wave biker gangs but by, huh…moving cities who consume each other in what looks to me like a rather dubious use of resources. Well, there is a country with a Chinese name with a rather international population “in the East” that does think the same and guards against the aggressive cities via a big ass armed wall.

Anyway, the film starts in the moving city of London that has made its way to what was once continental Europe to grab resources where only tiny citylets roam. Or that’s the official version, but if you think whatever kindly archaeologist/engineer Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) is building in St. Paul’s isn’t some kind of super weapon, I have something for you to rub on the soft parts of your neck. And indeed, the newest eaten city brings with its influx of newbies – hats off to New London for not murdering the population of the cities they eat - one glowering young adult named Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar). Her manifold kinds of glowers and her tendency of hiding a decorative scar under a fetching red scarf clearly mark her out as our heroine; and her first act of business upon arriving on London is to attempt to kill Valentine who has apparently murdered her mother. Inigo Montoya understands. That murder attempt does of course go pear-shaped (else this would be a rather short movie), not the least thanks to the intervention of one Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), a young historian of the underclass. Tom then proceeds to chase Hester through the innards of London; at the end of the chase, she lets drop some details about Valentine’s evilness before she falls through, well, the literal ass end of London. Which is where Valentine pushes Tom through too, for he can’t have anyone knowing he’s an evil mad scientist.

Fortunately, our young heroes have the survival abilities of cartoon characters, so all is set up for the two first learning to grudgingly respect one another, then to love. All the while, they are traversing the bizarre post-apocalyptic earth. Also appearing are slavers in absurd giant vehicles (because everything in this world is ten times as large as it makes sense for it to be); a spy/revolutionary with awesome anime hair (Jihae), a robot undead named Shrike (Stephen Lang); awesome airships with awesome roguish captains of various races and genders; a base in the clouds; and other goofy yet awesome crap. From time to time, we also pop in to Valentine being evil and scenes of his boring daughter (Leila George) and some equally boring guy (who cares) finding out that the guy the audience know is evil is indeed evil.

If all this sounds to you rather implausible and goofy even for the standards of a big fat blockbuster based on a popular YA novel, you are absolutely right. The film also suffers from an overload of standard big fat blockbuster clichés coming thick, heavy and often rather pointlessly (why is the “I am your father” bit even in there, for example!?), and a script so mechanical, you can hear its clockwork ticking so loudly it is impossible to ignore. It’s a pretty inefficient clockwork too: is it really necessary to cut away from our heroes having awesome adventures and our villain being villainous to Valentine’s daughter so the film can be sure we remember her later on when she has the important plot function of braking a city?

For a film as goofy as it is, Mortal Engines also is surprisingly, often nearly absurdly, po-faced, taking itself so seriously, treating the most obvious dramatic clichés as if they were really clever and hot shit. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a film based on a script by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (and Philippa Boyens), who certainly aren’t afraid of standard tropes and clichés but have quite a bit of experience in selling them convincingly.

Here’s the thing however: seeing all these weaknesses, I found myself enjoying Mortal Engines immensely. In part, the film’s insistence on rote clichés and ultra-traditional plotting told in an overly earnest manner might be stupid and ill-advised, but it is also charming as hell, rather like listening to an overenthusiastic kid telling us all about this awesome adventure story she has just come up with. Consequently, as long the film follows either Weaving’s patented villainy or the likeable couple of Hilmar (who really has an astonishing number of different glowers in her repertoire; I’d recommend her for a role as the masked vigilante of your choice) and Sheehan and their crazy adventures, I found myself grinning about this dumb nonsense like a loon. Only the handful of scenes with Valentine Jr. let down the film here, but there’s not too much of that to suffer through.


Then there’s the film’s other strength. Director Christian River’s was apparently Peter Jackson’s storyboard editor (though he also directed the short film Feeder (see Minutes Past Midnight), and clearly brings with him a great ability to put the film’s impressive, absurd, and clearly anime/manga/French language SF comic inspired production design front and centre. So while few of the contraptions and places we see make much sense once you start thinking about them, they are so impressive and beautiful, realized with so much imaginative detail, their silliness just makes them all the more beautiful. Because that’s what movies are there for too: showing us things we haven’t seen or imagined before just because they are wonderful (in the sense of “full of wonder”) not because they have to make sense. Rivers is also pretty good at actually using all the beautiful stuff in the action sequences, so all of it isn’t just a pretty backdrop but the heart and soul of the action.