Critic Reviews

The Sea isn't just brooding Scandinavian domestic tragedy, a lesser Bergman-Ibsen pastiche. It's also hilarious and rowdy, and it plays with our sympathies and expectations in such surprising ways, with such brilliant actors, it's easy to see why it won the equivalent of eight Icelandic Oscars.

A particularly strong family drama, and the Icelandic setting helps, adding a touch of the exotic.

For the most part the eruption of repressed anger is blindly destructive. There's little healing to be found in the bitter melodrama, but there is a small sense of triumph as the children face up and move on.

Filmmaker Kormákur orchestrates all this with broad strokes and winking intrigue, although the line between hambone melodrama and irony-tinged satire gets walked across a few too many times.

The loveliest moments put both politics and theatrics aside, conveying the strange beauty of a hard life involving little else than fish, water, and gray sky.

Old family secrets and fresh entanglements snake through the intricate plot like the tendrils of a particularly poisonous strain of ivy that flourishes only in the hot-house atmosphere of tiny towns, whatever the outside temperature.

The film's flamboyant portrayals of characters you love to hate have a malicious comic edge. If ever there were a movie to gladden the hearts of misanthropes, this is it.

An exploration of the way the sins of the father trickle down to his offspring, is dense with quirky characters and subplots all woven into a rather heavy-handed meditation on the evils of globalization.

As family reunion trauma flicks go, The Sea is by no means up to the standards of Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration," but it does make clear that Kormákur is a director whose evolution will be interesting to watch.

Baltasar Kormákur's wacky version of "King Lear," set in an Icelandic village where virtually everyone plays the fool.