Virgin Mountain

A bittersweet glimpse into the life of a good-natured guy who has resigned himself to being an outsider and to the solitude that entails. Sensitive and intimate, with an excellent minimalist performance by Gunnar Jónsson. I have not felt so moved by this kind of Scandinavian film in a long time. (07/18/2015)

(50th KVIFF) Fusi is certainly a pleasant character, but The Virgin Mountain is certainly not a pleasant film; after watching it I felt like putting a noose around my neck and jumping from a window – it was that depressing and sad. I can’t bear it when such a likeable character doesn’t find even a hint of happiness. In fact, I take it as bit of a low blow from the director and scriptwriter Dagur Kári, who conceived the film as a tragic-COMEDY with lots of very funny scenes. It seems that this year the Icelanders have decided to make us sad in Karlovy Vary (there’s another depressive thing from Iceland coming in KVIFF). A strong film, no doubt. 80 % (07/11/2015)

A great Icelandic drama; I felt bad for Fúsi the entire hour and a half. But he has sort of brought all of the misfortune on himself by not communicating with the people around him and by not expressing his feelings and emotions. On the other hand, I tried to push him – with my eyes at least – to some sort of actions and some really did appear in the movie. You can judge for yourself if there was any point to them, but I personally think that Fúsi will stay in my heart for a while, just like the actor who played him so brilliantly. (07/19/2016)

I don't expect much from Iceland anymore, the award-winning short story web Vonarstræti was naive and with the 90s, Rams fine, but shouldn't have won the Un Certain Regard under any circumstances. Therefore, an even more pleasant surprise is the return of the written-off Dagur Kári, who shot a film which, at its core, looks like every other Icelandic drama about a lone freak, but manages to create a believable human mountain of emotion, fragility and virgin goodness. A subtle film, without falsity and excesses, predictable, but surprisingly touching and captivating storytelling about pure goodness. Tender love is blind, as sung by Dolly Parton. Virgin Mountain is definitely one of the best things from there in the last (many) years. (01/21/2016)

I’m not afraid to say that we all have a bit of Fúsi. He’s a good, amazing man shut in his own world of inescapable loneliness and negativity to such an extent that he’s automatically considered eccentric and bad by those around him. A man who, through the overwhelming haze of his own inferiority, fails to realize that he’s by far the most normal. A bittersweet film that, with its slow pace, melancholic piano soundtrack and precisely measured performance by the lead actor, caresses the soul and evokes participation, even if it also plunges you into depression and makes you want to forget it (or rather what it is about). I’d like to correct my opening statement: if only everyone had a bit of Fúsi. (04/11/2016)

Judd Apatow Island Edition, minus the humor (there truly isn’t any). I can't shake a vision à la The Man from Acapulco, where on one freezing evening Dagur Kári's furnace got messed up and the repairman called in was a fat silent bearded man who took three hours to fix it, asked for an outrageous sum, the furnace went off again an hour after he left, and he then said over the phone that no one would get to it again until tomorrow. And so a supremely pissed off Kári spends the whole night at his keyboard, wrapped in a blanket, writing a script where he marches the poor repairman through a lake of shit until he gets so tired that he puts his forehead to the keyboard and rolls his head over once or twice more in his sleep, whereby, through a terrible coincidence, the words "a hint of a smile" appear at the end of the text. Otherwise, I can't explain the constant sadism against the protagonist. Kári was already creating variations on the story of Job in his debut, Noi the Albino. But there he knew how to play with the script, often twisting the disproportionate stones thrown to utterly absurd proportions, and punishing his characters who were kind of begging for it, deservedly so. In Virgin Mountain, he works with the utterly primeval structure of eliciting emotion through an ugly, taciturn antisocial who, without putting up any fight, gets picked on by everyone and everything. The individual scenes scream for an audience reaction as the protagonist plays with a little girl, raises a kitten or, in his morbid obesity, puts on a suit and tries to explain to the object of his interest in a mumbling voice that he bought her a trip to Egypt. A primitively unpleasant experience. (05/10/2016)

We all have something that we enter life with. On one hand, it's about how we look, what our physical predispositions are; on the other hand, it's something inside us that propels us forward or pulls us down. Fúsi is fat, but he also lives in a vacuum of his own making. The film quite rawly and intensely shows how it struggles to take that one important step and make a change. (12/12/2016)