The Sacred Mound

A young lad, Gestur (Steinþór Rafn Matthíasson), gets sent to live with relatives on an isolated peninsula off the coast of Iceland, while his mother, a concert pianist, is on tour. There the precocious boy falls in love with a woman nearly three times his age. The problem is that she is about to get married...

Close to the homestead is an ancient Viking burial mound, which, the boy is informed, contains a treasure and Viking weapons. Gestur is warned not to dig around the mound, as the spirits residing in the mound, would, when disturbed, cause the farmhouse to burn down. The boy becomes obsessed with the mound. The lad has a lively imagination, and convinces himself that he will need the ancient Viking weapons to kill the young man who is about to marry the girl Gestur is infatuated with.

It is not a great film; the narrative is rather thin. However, I did enjoy the Icelandic landscape and culture of the locals, and the actor who played Gestur did so convincingly. The quality of the copy of the film I viewed was unfortunately rather poor with lots of speckling. (I did not penalize the film for this.) 5.5/10.