Jar City

The English title for this film, 'Jar City', is kind of ugly. I'd have preferred they stuck with the Icelandic title 'Myrin', which apparently means 'swamp'. Whatever you call it, the film is a tough and grisly police procedural set in Iceland, though with some dark humour and a lot of juxtaposition of gastronomic action (policeman eats donut, policeman eats sheep's head, morgue guy eats something unidentifiable) and putrefying organs and corpses.

Oh yeah, the sheep's head. I probably should discuss this now. Interrupting traditional review trajectory in this way will reflect the way the audience's attention to the plot was distracted by the relative prominence of sheep heads in the film.

The lead cop, Erlendur, is an unflappably brutal character, though with the face of a bearded intellectual. In one scene he rolls up to some stall and asks the young lady there for a sheep's head. She hands him a tub and tells him 'Enjoy', McDonalds style. He takes the tub home, opens it up to reveal a sheep's head, and while he's thinking, starts by plucking out an eye and eating that. Then he pulls apart the skull and eats what's in there. This scene raised a lot of very surprised gullets in the audience.

A bit later came a cafeteria scene in which similarly prepared and clingwrapped sheep's head meals were all over the counter for the taking.

As usual, IMDB answers all questions. The sheep's head is an Icelandic delicacy and tastes a lot like lamb, they say. Though the stall at which Erlendur bought that first one is apparently the only one offering them for takeaway in the country, so relatively speaking this may have misrepresented the prevalence of sheep heads in Iceland by suggesting to us foreigners that you would typically rock up to a takeaway stall for a sheep's head.

Away from all the gastronomy, what I dug about this film was the harsh delivery of some rigorous police investigation in an environment completely unlike my own. Myrin reminds me why I broadly prefer genre films as a type. The demonstration of pure creativity is easier to effect in genre, and is achieved more rapidly, because fewer bridges have to be built from scratch. Myrin's methods are familiar but the specifics are unique. Erlendur is a captivating central figure of the kind you fantasise you could be when you don't feel like tolerating fools at all. Or when you do feel like throwing some jerk down a staircase.