60
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
RogerEbert.com by Christy Lemire
A coming-of-age drama that’s as beautiful and brutal as the remote, rural landscape of northern Iceland where it takes place.
63
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
The Swan hits many of the right notes but as an attempt to be something more, it paradoxically becomes less.
75
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
While Sól’s trajectory is the plot’s main thrust, she’s really a conduit to a vérité depiction of life’s myriad complexities.
45
Film Journal International by Maria Garcia
The simplicity and wonder of Sól’s quest for identity is muddled by pretense, and by circumstances and subplots that are tangential to her.
60
Film Threat by Nick Rocco Scalia
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.
63
Icelandic filmmaker Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir uses images, melancholy reveries and the voice-over narration of her nine year old protagonist to turn Guðbergur Bergsson’s novel into an austere, chilly and cryptic film.
80
Village Voice by Serena Donadoni
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.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
The child's discovery of the beauty of nature, the workaday brutalities of farm life and the adult world's disappointments and betrayals rings true, to a point, and the young actor in the role is memorably guarded and watchful. In Hjörleifsdóttir's adaptation, though, the themes are too studied and neat, playing out in a way that can feel oppressive rather than revelatory.
40
The New York Times by Teo Bugbee
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.