Winter Brothers (2017)

Hlynur Pálmason's debut feature Winter Brothers arrived in 2017 as a co-production between Iceland and Denmark, backed by Masterplan Pictures, Join Motion Pictures, and New Danish Screen. Pálmason, an Icelandic filmmaker who had previously worked in short films and visual art, uses this feature debut to establish what would become recognisable tendencies in his work: long, considered shots, a fixation on physical labour, and a mood that sits somewhere between naturalism and something more feverish. The film's tagline, "A Lack of Love Story", gives you a reasonable sense of the temperature you're walking into. If you've spent any time with Icelandic cinema (and if that corner of world cinema interests you, there's a look at another Icelandic production from the same year in the review of Unknown Soldier (2017)), you'll know that warmth and conventional narrative comfort are rarely the priorities.

The story centres on two brothers, Emil and Johan, played by Elliott Crosset Hove and Simon Sears, living and working in a remote industrial community during a bitter winter. Their days are shaped by the rhythms of mine work and a cramped domestic existence, and the drama grows out of a feud that develops between their household and another family. Vic Carmen Sonne and Lars Mikkelsen round out the principal cast, with Mikkelsen in particular bringing some weight to the film's simmering tensions. The setting, all grey rock, industrial machinery, and flat winter light, does much of the heavy lifting in terms of atmosphere, and cinematography is kept deliberately rough and unglamorous, which was very much a deliberate aesthetic choice on Pálmason's part rather than any lack of resource. For context, Hove would go on to work with Pálmason again on later projects, and his performance here is the kind of committed, physical piece of work that made him a name in European arthouse circles. The 100-minute runtime is relatively lean for the territory, though the film makes no concessions to pace or conventional storytelling. It is the sort of film that tends to divide festival audiences cleanly, those who respond to its rigour and those who simply find it an endurance. For a sense of how that kind of uncompromising drama sits alongside other world cinema reviewed here, the coverage of Yi Yi (2000) is worth a look, as is the review of Adrift (2018), another Icelandic production that leans into difficult conditions and stripped-back storytelling.

A-Z World Movie Tour Iceland For the first 10 minutes or so I didn't have a clue what was going on because it was too dark. It was basically some people that appeared to be down a mine. Barely a word was spoken. The scenery and settings were quite interesting but the picture quality was really quite poor. Basically every scene in the mines was near unwatchable. The  basic premise of the story is 2 brothers live together in what looks to be rural iceland. They work in a mine in a dead end manual job and don't seem particularly happy. One brother makes moonshine using chemicals he steals from work. One of his colleagues gets unwell as a result. There are alot of penis scenes for some reason and the ending is so abrupt it makes no sense at all. Overall a really disappointing movie.

I think that about sums it up, honestly. There's an audience for this kind of film, and I respect that, but a movie that makes itself near impossible to watch in its opening stretch, and then ends before it's really resolved anything, is a hard sell regardless of any artistic intentions behind it. Sometimes a challenging film rewards your patience and sometimes it simply asks too much without giving enough back, and for me this one falls firmly into the latter camp. Worth knowing it exists if you're methodically working through world cinema by country, but I wouldn't rush to it. A grim watch in more ways than one.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-29

View on Letterboxd →

Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Winter Brothers (2017) on YouTube

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
Stream: YouTube TV · Criterion Channel · Philo · OVID
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store
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 Iceland: Unknown Soldier (2017) · Adrift (2018)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)