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The Swan(Svanurinn)

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Iceland, Estonia, Germany · 2018
1h 31m
Director Ása Hjörleifsdóttir
Starring Thor Kristjansson, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Grima Valsdóttir, Þuríður Blær Jóhannsdóttir
Genre Drama

After getting caught stealing, nine-year-old Sol is sent to spend the summer with relatives on a remote Iceland farm. What her parents hope to be an opportunity to mature and grow soon turns into something far more dramatic as she becomes entangled in a relationship between a brooding farmhand and the farmer's daughter.

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What are critics saying?

60

Screen International by

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.

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.

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

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

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.

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