The Oath / Eiðurinn (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – Icelandic auteur Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband, 2 Guns, Everest) directs and stars in this psychological thriller about a father who tries to pull his daughter out of her world of drugs and petty crime, only to find that danger can be found in unexpected places.

My Take – Honestly, I was never aware of an existing film industry in Iceland right until I caught up with this one at the Dubai Film Festival 2016. Promoted at the festival as Iceland’s more realistic version of the Liam Neeson starrer ‘Taken’, a large part of my interest in seeing this film was to gawk over the scenic Icelandic landscapes and watching director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband, 2 Guns, Everest) head back to his roots while also taking up the main lead along with producing & writing the venture. The film, whose two-month shoot was the longest in Icelandic cinema history, is a tribute to its workaholic co writer-director-producer-star’s professionalism and standards-raising attention to detail & of course the hard work has payed off as the film is currently the highest grossing film of 2016 in Iceland. It’s a film in the Breaking Bad or Taken vein, with a twist of Mystic River (same cold feeling, plus another father with two daughters from different women). But the best part is that the film has Baltasar & co writer Ólafur Egilsson’s taut script in its favor, which keeps the momentum going at a high octane pace by making use of similar films of the genre without falling into their traps or negative aspects. Sure, at times it may seem at the expense of establishing any attachment to the characters & with a run time clocking around 110 minutes, some of the ongoing explanations are send to the back bench in favor of entertainment, but for such a small film which is trying to be ‘Taken Icelandic style’ it kind of works.

The story follows Finnur (Baltasar Kormákur), a heart surgeon and a father of two girls. Deeply sadden by the loss of his own father & the guilt of never fixing their difficult relation, Finnur decides to keep his father’s summer house. In this emotional state of mind his concerns are shifted towards his oldest daughter Anna (Hera Hilmar) due to her increasingly erratic behavior, the result of her constant drug abuse. But as Anna has passed the age of 18, Finnur has no legal rights over & cannot force her to get into a rehab. Finnur’s concerns increase when Anna introduces the family to her older boyfriend Ottar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), a drug dealer and petty criminal who enables Anna’s downward spiral into hard partying and drug A distressed late night telephone call from a paranoid Anna prompts Finnur to act, beginning with warning Ottar to stay from his daughter & followed by his failed attempt to frame Ottar in a drug bust. However, the situation soon escalates, as Ottar tries to extort money, which Finnur is ready to pay, but is not sure that it would solve the problem for good and comes up with a scheme which may finally keep his family out of the harm’s way, even if it is too reckless. Let me get this straight first, this is not a typical revenge film filled with violence, hand to hand combats and car chases (well it does have a small share of it), this tonally uneven picture is a small cross between an Icelandic Liam Neeson-style dad-vigilante film and an intimate domestic drama. The film shows the degree to which one’s responsibilities as a doctor can get in the way of personal matters or vice versa. I appreciated that the film doesn’t waste time showing characters getting from place to place – which makes many films feel padded. The doctor gets in the car or on his bike, and we are where he wants to go within seconds. The speed of the film is exhilarating, and is stylistically evocative of the way in which the doctor’s decisions are ultimately final: once you take certain actions – especially as a doctor – there’s no going back. That is because Kormakur sets his films in the real world, where people have family and professional ties that create unforeseen repercussions to one’s decisions or sudden bursts.

This way, the director can address moral questions (is it possible for Finnur to come back to the hospital and operate on a kid to save him, right after having physically endangered Ottar’s life? The answer is no), or look at society in its entirety (it will eventually emerge that fathers are always the ones who bring sorrow and pain to the people around them), without ever losing track of the stakes and the rhythm of his plot. Moreover, Kormakur tells his stories as close as he can to what the characters experience. Being a surgeon, Finnur can actually go into the flesh of people and following his example, the film makes its way into the bodies and into the minds of the characters involved in the story. Thus the film manages to go deeply into their dramas, even though the plot remains simple and takes only a few days to unfold. At the end of this short period of time everyone loses, and we feel how much it hurts for each of them because of how thoughtfully and intensely the film has looked into their existences. Finnur remains nevertheless haunted by his conscience, and most importantly by his daughter – who, in true Hitchcockian fashion, understood everything because of a tiny overlooked detail that only she and we know about. The good thing about the cinematography is that the film has numerous shots that lovingly caress the barren yet beautiful terrain of Iceland, and although the location has little bearing on the plot of the film it does provide the cold, distant aesthetic that a thriller of this nature benefits from. However, the film starts to lose credibility when Finnur takes Ottar hostage, essentially torturing him, but keeping him alive. The central character’s motivation gets rather cloudy at this point. The meticulous preparation would seem to preclude the idea that Ottar is just a desperate father out of his depth, but the messiness and malevolence of his treatment of Ottar is at odds with what we know of Finnur as a doctor and parent. A bizarre chunk of dialogue, in which Ottar reminisces about his childhood fantasies of beating and then raping his own mother, seems stridently at odds with the rest of the film. Plus, there’s no twist, no shocking turn that reframes the film, just an increase in arrogance with very little retribution. Baltasar, who apparently first came to prominence as an actor, is in front of the camera for the first time since 2008’s ‘Reykjavík-Rotterdam’, another film from Iceland, and directing himself in a prominent role for the first time ever, actually does a good job. Of the supporting cast, Hera Hilmar is particularly strong, bringing a teenaged naivety to Anna’s self-destructive behavior. Gísli Örn Garðarsson is sinister and Sigrún Edda Björnsdóttir makes a forceful impression as the detective who suspects that concerned father Finnur might not be all that he appears. On the whole, ‘The Oath’ is a serviceable thriller that is well-paced, well-written and shot well if not thought-provoking.