Ivalu (2023)

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching something genuinely beautiful do something genuinely grim with itself. That's Ivalu in a nutshell, and it's the reason I've been sitting here struggling to land on how to write about it.

This short film, representing Greenland on my A-Z World Movie Tour, arrives with a certain pedigree. It picked up an Academy Award nomination in the short film category, which tells you the filmmaking community noticed something here. And honestly, you can see why on a purely technical level. The Greenlandic landscape is captured with a kind of austere, aching beauty that stops you in your tracks. The score sits underneath it all just right. There are moments where the whole thing feels like it could blossom into something genuinely moving and memorable.

And then it doesn't.

The story follows the search for a missing sibling, and what it uncovers is incestuous abuse. Now, look, I'm not someone who thinks dark subject matter is automatically off-limits in film. I've sat through plenty of difficult watches and come out the other side feeling like the difficulty served a purpose. I reviewed both Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013), and Von Trier pushes into genuinely uncomfortable territory across both of those. But there's a difference between darkness that illuminates something and darkness that just sits there, heavy and unprocessed.

With Ivalu, I kept waiting for the film to do something with what it was telling me. The format is short, so you're working with limited space, but that's also not an excuse. Some of the most emotionally devastating films I've encountered in this world tour have been brief. The issue here is that the subject matter arrives and the film almost shrugs. The beautiful visuals and the considered score end up feeling weirdly mismatched to the content, like someone put a gorgeous frame around something harrowing and then forgot to ask what they actually wanted to say about it.

I've noticed, travelling through this A-Z project, that abuse comes up constantly. Country after country, in different forms, through different cultural lenses. I understand why. Cinema has always been a space where communities process things they can't easily talk about elsewhere, and in smaller nations with smaller film industries, a short like this might be the only opportunity a filmmaker gets to put something like this on screen. I respect that impulse enormously. But respecting the impulse and connecting with the execution are two separate things, and here I found myself doing the former without managing the latter.

What makes it sting slightly more is that potential I mentioned. The bones of something genuinely powerful are here. The setting alone does so much work. There are choices in how the story is structured that suggest real craft behind the camera. It absolutely could have gone somewhere else, somewhere that let the beauty and the bleakness pull against each other in a productive way. Instead, the revelation lands and the film more or less ends, leaving me cold rather than shaken.

Two stars. The craft is evident and I won't pretend otherwise. But a film that looks this good and leaves me feeling this little has missed something essential.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2023  | Watched: 2025-06-23

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from Denmark: Only God Forgives (2013) · Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013) · Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013) · Monos (2019)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)