Sunday 3 March 2024

Northern Comfort (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, 2023)


A group of people united by having too much money to spend and a chronic fear of flying attend a course to enable them to overcome that fear. However the final test on the course, an actual flight to Iceland, goes skewwhiff, heavy turbulence causing panic, and then on arrival they find out that all return flights are cancelled for weather reasons. An overnight stay in a spa hotel only causes more tensions.
The tone of the Icelandic director's first foray into English-language cinema is as unsteady as the flight that so unnerved the passengers. It doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: a farce, a black comedy or something deeper. Timothy Spall turns in his baseline grumpy performance as a best-selling writer with issues resulting from a military background, there's a vacuous social media influencer who is satirised in a vacuously ham-fisted manner, the course leader who doesn't have a clue about what he's doing and a neurotic property developer who has had to hide where she really is from her boyfriend. It's not utterly witless all the way through, but it is highly illogical and makes one suspect that the director thought "I can give that a go" after seeing the famously execrable Sex Lives of the Potato Men.

3/10

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