Movie Review SSJ

In the frigid currents of the North Atlantic, director Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City (Mýrin) constructs a polar graveyard of collective trauma. Merging the DNA of Nordic noir with existential philosophy, the film uses Iceland’s geological textures and cultural psyche to lure viewers into a narrative maze of collapsing patriarchy, cyclical historical violence, and genetic determinism. The opening cold-toned long shot is deceptively conventional: beneath the framework of a crime procedural lies a lethal interrogation of humanity’s ethical foundations.

Kormákur employs a circular, saga-inspired structure, weaving two deaths separated by three decades into a web of mirrored fates. In the winter of 1997, detective Erlendur’s fractured paternal love surfaces at the scene of his daughter’s drug overdose; thirty years prior, an unknown father’s grief freezes beside the ice-cold coffin of a girl named Daisy. These parallel timelines, bathed in Iceland’s perpetual twilight, create a surreal temporal fold. When forensic saws crack open Daisy’s skull to reveal missing brain tissue, the rational light of modern science shatters, replaced by primal dread: what patriarchal society consumes will return with greater ferocity.

The film’s visual language epitomizes contemporary Nordic aesthetics. The cinematography transcends geographical documentation: snow blanketing crime scenesizes repressed collective memory; the sterile glow of autopsy labs exposes the limits of rationality; recurring shattered glass (police station windows, basement doors) mocks notions of wholeness. The most potent symbol—the vanished brain—transforms from a vessel of scientific empiricism into a physical of patriarchal violence. When Erlendur discovers the frozen organ in a suspect’s freezer, the montage juxtaposing forensic close-ups with flashbacks of Daisy’s eyes plunges empirical certainty into ethical chaos.

The film’s deconstruction of patriarchy is strikingly dialectical. While the serial rapist “Trio” embodies overt violence, deeper networks of oppression root themselves in societal structures: 107 uninvestigated rape reports in police archives mirror the cracks in Poe’s House of Usher; Daisy’s mother’s identity as a sex worker lays bare the political economy of female bodies under patriarchy. More subversive is the dual unmasking of “fatherhood”—Erlendur’s conflicted love for his addict daughter mirrors the killer’s pathological guardianship of his terminally ill child. This of paternal expression crystallizes patriarchy’s inherent contradictions.

The revelation of fibrovascular hemangioma—a Y-chromosomal disease killing Daisy and her descendants—elevates the film into philosophical terrain. Narratively, this genetic flaw bridges three decades of causality; metaphorically, it delivers a final judgment on patriarchal lineage. Kormákur injects posthumanist inquiry: when modern medicine encodes violence into genes, and legal systems become complicit, is “civilization” merely violence refined? The killer’s Arctic confession resonates with existential despair—he is both victim of genetic violence and perpetrator of systemic brutality. This identity duality suspends viewers in moral absolute zero.

The sound design engineers a unique auditory violence. During Daisy’s funeral, the absence of ambient noise creates an aural vacuum until the coffin’s thud ruptures the silence—a sonic metaphor for the film’s core thesis: silenced violence will eventually roar through temporal folds. Even more potent is the subversion of Icelandic folk songs. When an elderly rape survivor hums a traditional melody, her voice intertwines with victims’ muffled cries on the soundtrack, forcing cultural memory and individual trauma into bloody coalescence.

As end credits fade into a blizzard, Kormákur denies the narrative closure typical of Nordic noir, leaving instead an existential quandary. The scalpel plunged into the killer’s heart ends individual violence but fails to indict systemic complicity. In Iceland’s eternal twilight, Erlendur gazes at his daughter’s empty bed—on this 30-year-old patriarchal ruin, perhaps acknowledging violence’s hereditary nature is the first step toward dawn. The sudden aurora borealis in the final frame, irrationally vibrant, daubs the dark fable with tentative hope: within humanity’s violent genome, might there exist a mutation to break the cycle?

As the newest evolution of Nordic noir, Jar City exemplifies Icelandic New Wave directors’ philosophical reinvention of crime cinema. While Hollywood recycles Se7en’s religious motifs, Kormákur confronts bioethical dilemmas of the genomic age. This fusion of hyper-local landscapes with universal inquiry may chart a path beyond genre clichés—in Reykjavik’s frozen nights, a girl’s mutilated corpse holds up a mirror to civilization’s pathology.

The film’s treatment of memory operates as a spectral force. Erlendur’s investigation becomes a form of necromancy, summoning ghosts of patriarchal sins through forensic rituals. The recurring motif of preserved organs (brains in freezers, blood-stained glass) literalizes Iceland’s struggle to preserve cultural identity amid globalization’s homogenizing forces. Even the titular “jar city”—a colloquial term for Reykjavik’s medical archives—morphs into a metaphor for national memory: a sealed container of festering secrets.

Kormákur further interrogates gender through Iceland’s unique social history. The film’s 30-year timeline (1967–1997) parallels the country’s transformation from fishing villages to a modern welfare state. Yet the Trio’s unpunished rapes—spanning both eras—reveal how patriarchy adapts rather than dissipates. When modern female characters refuse to testify, their silence isn’t shame but strategic survival in a system where justice remains a male prerogative.

The genetic curse’s gendered specificity (affecting male-line descendants) inverts traditional victimhood. Daisy, though female, becomes a passive vector, her body a battleground for male transgressions. This biological determinism clashes with Iceland’s progressive facade—ranked #1 in gender equality yet haunted by its #MeToo reckoning. The film thus serves as a cinematic memento mori: progress, like Daisy’s preserved brain, may be an illusion masking festering rot.

Jar City transcends crime cinema to become a forensic examination of humanity itself. Its unflinching gaze into patriarchy’s corpse—decomposing yet still potent—challenges viewers to confront the viral nature of violence. In an age of CRISPR and #MeToo, Kormákur’s masterpiece asks: Can we excise the malignant genes of our cultural DNA, or are we doomed to repeat the autopsy forever? The answer, like Iceland’s midnight sun, remains blindingly ambiguous.