Skip to main content

Bibliophile reviews the movie Mýrin (Jar City)

The film Mýrin (The Mire)is based on the book of the same title by Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. It was published in English as Jar City (also as Tainted Blood). I read the book a couple of years ago but never got round to reviewing it. Here is a link to Maxine's review: Jar City review.

The story begins with the discovery of the body of a murdered man in a basement apartment in a neighbourhood known as Norðurmýri, The North Mire, so-called because that is what was there before the houses were built. He turns out to have been a vicious thug and the investigation soon leads the police to start trying to find the victims of crimes he committed years before and which may explain why he was murdered. They also decide to re-open the investigation into the disappearance of one of his cronies many years before, an investigation that was closed with what Erlendur, the leading investigator, thinks is suspicious haste.

The movie was directed by Baltasar Kormákur who is probably Iceland's best film director right now. Being an actor himself, he is good at getting the best out the actors he directs and it shows in his films.

When I first heard that Ingvar E. Sigurðsson was to play the lead, Erlendur, I was not convinced that he could do it properly. For one thing, he looks nothing like what I had imagined Erlendur to look like, and secondly he is about 10 years too young and youthful-looking to boot. I need not have worried – Ingvar is one of Iceland's best actors and pulled the role off very convincingly, as did Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir who played his daughter, drug addict Eva, and Atli Rafn Sigurðsson as a young father driven to desperation by the tragic death of his daughter, to name only three of the characters. Everyone was, in fact, very good in their roles.

The changes to the story from book to movie were minor and were, in my opinion, necessary for the cinematic adaptation. The movie is filmed in colours that reflect the moods of people and nature, the colours being warm and homey inside Erlendur's apartment, cold and stark in an early funeral scene, and at other times sepia coloured or almost monotonous. Nothing is beautified, the people look like people, not beautifully made up dolls like in most Hollywood movies, and nature looks by turns harsh and beautiful. The director has not given much into the mania common among Icelandic film makers to show off the country to its best advantage with endless landscape shots but has mostly stuck to a few aerial views of roads winding through black and green lava fields which look very good but get a bit repetitious after the second one. In between are scenes of Icelandic weather at its howling, windy worst.

In her review of the book, Maxine mentions an impossibility that mars the story somewhat. That particular plot device is made a little clearer and more believable in the movie. It takes massive suspension of disbelief to accept that anyone could break the coding system Decode Genetics uses to hide the identities of the people included in their genetics studies, but having seen what can happen if many enough people are careless enough, the explanation of how the system was bypassed that is given in the film becomes somewhat believable.

The story as it is told in the movie is an emotional rollercoaster, often sad, even tragic, but sometimes very funny as well, especially in scenes involving Erlendur's young colleague, yuppie type Sigurður Óli who fancies himself to be a cop like the ones you see in American crime movies (right down to doughnuts and take-out coffee). It says something about the skill of the filmmakers that you can laugh at a movie that has so much ugliness and tragedy in it as Mýrin does.

Many reviewers have called Mýrin the best movie ever made in Iceland. I can not be a judge of that, as I have not seen all Icelandic movies, but I will venture to say that it is the best and most realistic crime movie ever made in Iceland. See it if you can – while it may lose something in translation the visual aspects are still the same. I also recommend reading the book beforehand as it can only add to the enjoyment of the movie.

Rated 8 out of a possible 10.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great review, and thanks for linking to mine of the book. I can't wait to see the film -- not least to see if it is indeed any more convincing about breaking a double-blind code than the book!
I'll link to your review from Petrona.
Best wishes
Maxine.
Peter Rozovsky said…
Do you know of plans to release the movie in the U.S.? I thought basing the solution on the genetic code took unique advantage of the story's situation in Iceland; the book could not have been set anywhere else. Of course, I lack Maxine's knowledge of science!
===================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Bibliophile said…
Peter, considering that all of the director's movies have been released abroad, I am certain this one will be too.
As to the genetic code - that is still in the movie, but a more plausible way of getting past it has been suggested, i.e. not breaking but bypassing. The exact method is not explained, but a suggestion is made as to how someone could have done it if enough people had been careless (or trusting) enough.
Peter Rozovsky said…
Thanks. Perhaps I'll read the novel again before I see the movie. This discussion could increase my scientific literacy.
===================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme