Metalhead (Ragnar Bragason, 2013): Iceland

Reviewed by Jacob Wirsenius, viewed at the Santa Barbara international film festival, Metropolitan 4.

A girl that decide to carry on her dead brothers passion, rock music. The director Ragnar Bragason depicts a typical teenager growing up rebelling against the world. It’s also a story about how hard it can be to be a parent to a rebelling teenager. The film is starring Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson playing Karl, Thora Borg Helga playing Hera and Sveinn Olafur Gunnarsson playing Janus.

Hera and her family lives at a farm and one day when her brother is out on the field with the tractor she’s gonna get him for dinner. She runs towards the tractor and a terrible accident occurs. Her brother falls off the tractor and does not survive. After this Hera blames herself and becomes this really rebellion girl and she starts to play electric guitar, just like her brother did. Many years go by and she still lives on the farm with her parents but she want to move in to the city so that she can join a rock-band. She has problems with that because she drinks a lot of alcohol and always get in trouble with her parents. She works at ha slaughter but gets fired when she makes her boss mad my playing loud heavy-metal music from the speakers. She knows she has to do something for her life to change and she meets a young priest that just moved to town. She begins to like a little bit and notice that they’re not so different. The priest is into heavy-metal and also has a tattoo. He gives her advice and try to make her change her life.

It’s a film about dreams and hopes but it’s also very dark and wan’t to deliver a dark message. It was interesting follow the Hera during the film, to see how her character grew and I really felt for her and hopes she would succeed. There was a lot of strong scenes that put the mood for example when the brother falls of that tractor and dies and also the scene where Hera stands in front of her brothers grave with her electric guitar and plays heavy-metal. All the colors, composition and how it was filmed really went along with the theme and and depressing tone that the film has. The color black is seen all the time through the film which represents for example death and the whole film was very dark lightened. I could feel that Thora took it very seriously and made the character very trustworthy and believable. Even though I felt a little uncomfortable it had a beautiful story and it felt really realistic. A depict from any real-life story there is.

It wasn’t one of the better films a saw during the festival but also not the worst. If you like heavy-metal or real-story kind of movies I would recommend this to you. A dark film about growing up with the feeling that it’s you against the world.