Woman at War (2018)

Title: Kona fer í stríð

Year: 2018

Genre: Comedy| Drama |Thriller|

Runtime: 101 min

Director:  Benedikt Erlingsson

Starring: Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, Jóhann Sigurðarson, Juan Camillo Roman Estrada

7,7/10

Halla, a woman in her fifties, declares war on the local aluminum industry to prevent it from disfiguring her country. She risks all she has to protect the highlands of Iceland-but the situation could change with the unexpected arrival of a small orphan in her life.

CREATIVE STORYTELLING ABOUT AN ECO-WARRIOR

It’s easy. Forget everything you sought you knew about Scandinavian movies or Islandic cinema. Woman at War will probably change that perception of the northern Europe cinema landscape. Scandinavian stories provided in film are always gritty, dark and crime-based. It shouldn’t be like that, right? Maybe islandic film is the new way to make movies?

In the beginning of the movie, it shows our main character which you as an audience will follow in a straight line with some side-ways and short-cuts along the way. Hella, who has thought on a way to destroy the high-voltage line to the power plants in order to protect the environment, the country and the planet. The movie follows her journey through settlement with her almost-neighbour, a colleague and twin sister. Her sabotage on the power plants make the Islandic government think it’s a terror-attack. Compares it to the terror-organization ISIS. It gets blown up in a greater proportion in a most unthinkable way where CIA and FBI is introduced to this case. It’s has some dark comedy and should perhaps be considered it as a drama-comedy. Most of what happens in the movie is absurd and hard to take seriously even if it tries it hardest to be thoughtful.

Hella, played by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, brings on a rather interest performance. She is a sympatric character that lives with the ideal life of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. She has some odd quirks that makes it easy to follow and like her. She has great sense of humour that is provided through the movie. These odd episodic moments that Hella constantly provides even where she plays her own twin sister, brings the sense of wonderful images of the cold landscape to insightful ending.

This movie is quite absorbing even though it’s filled with lack of motivations for the character and plot holes. It’s a simple movie that goes from A to B. The cinematography is good and doesn’t label the movie as an independent feature all through. It displays an Islandic culture just as it has digestic music non-stop within the movie. This means that the musical band is shown in the movie as they play and sometimes interacts with the protagonist. The music doesn’t overlap. It has foreign language that show the audience a different side of the world of cinema which includes Islandic, French, Spanish and English. Things happens in the movie that doesn’t seem clear at all but for some reason it makes sense in the end. It’s a nice, small comedic film that more should watch and appreciate.