Rams

At first glance, the film doesn't exactly pull you in with its plot. It’s about two feuding brothers who haven't spoken in 40 years, but are brought together by their shared love for the flock of sheep they care for. But underneath this is a quiet, strongly emotional gem that doesn't need words, nor does it waste them, to engage you. (20/08/2016)

Two rams reared by rams are forty years old and do not talk to each other until they are forced to do so by an infection that attacks their neighboring herds. A poetic drama about brothers who benefit from minimalist poetics, captivating landscapes, the creative cameras of the rising star Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, economical acting creations of bearded lonely people and typical Icelandic weird exotics. It ends up attempting to combine naturalism / symbolism in a conclusion that feels somewhat annoyingly didactic and amateur. But otherwise, given the competition from the Scandinavian closed dramas, Rams definitely belongs under the Cannes spotlights. [Cannes 2015] (20/05/2015)

Sheep happens. You will get more out of Rams if you like the more remote areas of Iceland. The movie is sensitive in portraying the characters and their relationships, refined in dispensing information, constantly maintaining the viewer’s curiosity, often through gestures instead of words. Rams imaginatively depicts the Nordic reality of people for whom it is unacceptable to take a sheep raised on genetically modified feed to their farm. (23/09/2016)

(50th KVIFF) Together with The Virgin Mountain, an Icelandic combo of old, sad fat men. A film about two quarrelling sheep-farming brothers who have lost their herds to scrapie. The extreme situation gradually forces them to exchange a few of words and re-evaluate their relationship. From Scandinavia I’m more used to dramedies than pure dramas, but watch out, Rams is really very serious and slow, and the humour is present only in trace amounts. More an emotional than a narrative film that filled me with melancholy and sadness. At home in front of the computer, it’d probably be boring, but on the festival screen it was engrossing. 80 % (11/07/2015)

Eliciting pathos, canary level torture. Watching two overgrown elders, who at some points are hard to tell apart from their bleating protégés, lose everything they cared about and understood in life is a bit like watching Atreyu drowning his horse in a swamp for an hour and a half (AKA childhood ruined. Thanks Petersen). But then again, the austerity and first signal of the whole plot is quite meritorious, because I don't think I could survive a broader statement in this one. I'm glad it's down-to-earth, I'm glad it's "merely" telling a nice and sad story in the first and last lines. (08/03/2016)