Cruelty (Anton Sigurdsson, 2016) Iceland

Reviewed by Laurine Lambert. Viewed at Metropolitan Fiesta 5, Santa Barbara Film Festival 2017.

Cruelty is a movie from Iceland. The director is Anton Sigurdsson. The lead actress in the movie is Guarun Marie Bjarnadottir. I will start right away that this is the worst movie I watched in my life. I’ve seen so many movies, and they’re always good or just average, but this has absolutely no story line. I’m also going to mention that the subtitles literally disappeared most of the time in the movie. Maybe thats why I didn’t get the story line? Because the most important scenes the subtitles didn’t appear, very confusing for me and all the people, because I’m pretty sure we can’t speak Icelandic.

The movie starts right away with two girls murdered in the woods. The lead actress plays the detective, they’re looking for the killer. It has no story. They are going to find in the beginning lots of people ”who they think is the killer”. Its super confusing, because suddenly there are like ten new actors. So you already find out in the beginning of the movie that the killer is her brother. They don’t really say its the brother, but its pretty obvious. That just ruins the movie for making it so obvious. The characters were not interesting to watch, some characters they showed and suddenly their story disappeared in the movie. That makes you wanna say but wait what happened with that character? But then suddenly that person is gone. I just knew right in the beginning of the movie that this is a bad movie. Usually detective movies can be really really good, but this has no reason to watch it. The cinematography was really dark, so thats a good job they did, because usually detective murder stories aren’t super bright happy movies.

I don’t have a lot to say about this movie, but I’m sure there are people that may like it. On IMDb it got only one star so I’m not the only one. I feel sad, because I really tried my best to enjoy this movie and it just didn’t work. So one of the most important things in a movie is GOOD STORY.