The Swan

Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.

While Sól’s trajectory is the plot’s main thrust, she’s really a conduit to a vérité depiction of life’s myriad complexities.

The Swan hits many of the right notes but as an attempt to be something more, it paradoxically becomes less.

It’s unfortunate that The Swan doesn’t fully catch fire as a family drama or a rites-of-passage story, but a film with such a rich and finely honed sense of place is one that nevertheless deserves to be seen.

The film delivers a dark coming-of-age tale through the young lead’s uncertain perception, tinged with uneasy implications and poetic flights of fancy.

The simplicity and wonder of Sól’s quest for identity is muddled by pretense, and by circumstances and subplots that are tangential to her.

Director Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir never displays the passion that her characters suggest in their stories. If her film ever diverged from its ubiquitous images of misty mountains or its plodding piano score, perhaps its characters’ incessant mythmaking would convey deeper mysteries, inner worlds that are not visible to the eye.