Mýrin (Baltasar Kormákur, 2006)

Hooked on Wallander? Fixated with Stieg Larsson? Then you may feel that you are the target market of another helping of Nordic police grit, including one from Iceland. Surely the unforgivingly bleak landscape and off-kilter denizens will add existential import to the inevitable succession of repressed perversions and gruesome acts?
Yes and no. Jar City gratifies in serving up all of the above with a grim efficiency, and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, as the grizzled world-weary policeman Erlendur investigating deaths separated by thirty years while trying to cope with his drug-addicted daughter, does a fine job with investing his tough and acerbic character with some interest. The script also contains enough ingenuity that detective genre twist requirements are well met.
But Kormákur, perhaps best known for his 2000 directorial debut, the nicely quirky 101 Reykjavik, ultimately leaves a void where pathos should be and where it is in either of the Henning Mankell adaptations, by comparison. And does Iceland, if it really has that many lowlife, not understand the concept of a high-security prison?

6/10