Cruelty (Anton Sigurdsson, 2016) | Iceland

Reviewed by Gio Traina and viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film

Cruelty, or Grimmd in Icelandic, is an extremely dark mystery thriller about the murder of two innocent young girls that keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire movie. The film starts out very dark with the main protagonist Officer Hildur (Guðrún María Bjarnadóttir) showing the bodies of the two daughters to the mother. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie as its very dark, disturbing and cold. As the movie goes on the viewer gets introduced to the pedophile-like suspects accused of the murder; its a small Icelandic town so there aren’t many people to look for.

The story continues and completely changes your opinion on who committed the crime. Some of the suspects include a grown man with autism, the officer’s own brother and a man accused of touching children a long time ago. Throughout the movie you begin to lose trust with almost every character and completely messes with your head making you think very hard. The subtitles were off at times but in a Q&A directly after the film, the producer mentioned that was not intentional and will be fixed. 

Every performance by every character was exceptional and was up to par with American actors. This comes as a big surprise as the producer mentioned after the film that the budget was only $250,000 USD. The camera angles and cinematography were top notch for a fast paced mystery movie. Many different settings and sets were also used throughout. This film was very much just an American thriller in Icelandic and set in Iceland. That doesn’t mean it was bad because the US is #1 when it comes to the movie industry and this particular story wasn’t generic by any means.

I recommend this to anyone who likes thriller mysteries and mind-churning movies. The end really ties up everything perfect leaving the viewer only confused by few minor things that might not be caught on a first viewing.