Óráð (Delirium)
Ingi (Hjörtur Jóhann Jónsson) is a loving father with more than his share of self-inflicted problems. He has to crawl to his girlfriend’s overbearing uncle (Jóhann Sigurðarson) for a chance at a job, and is given humiliating box-stacking work rather than the office gig he’s qualified for. He’s due in court after a drunk driving incident which led to the death of a woman in a burning car and also occasionally runs into the dead woman’s angry brother at the supermarket. The strength of the Icelandic krona means he and his girlfriend Snædís (Heiddis Chadwick Hlynsdottir) will have to raise the rent on the anonymous flat they let out as an Air B n B to foreign tourists … and that business might be about to incur a huge extra cleaning expense because neighbours have complained about a rotting corpse smell and no one has seen the American who last rented the place for a week or so.
Things only get worse when Ingi and a specialist cleaner tackle the scene of an apparent suicide and Ingi finds an antique box which contains an SS badge, a tape recorder, old coins, some suspect cassette memoirs and an apparent curse which turns out to be intimately tied to Ingi’s current streak of bad luck. After he’s opened the thing, he becomes subject to weird periods of missing time which make it hard for him to stick to apparent (and actual) sobriety – one moment he’s driving his chatty mother to the airport at night, the next he’s parked in volcanic wastes by bright chilly daylight. Flashbacks to WWII and some Southern European witchfinding reveal that the box has a long, horrible history – though you wonder why the Nazis who had hold of the thing for a while didn’t just gift-wrap it and send it to Winston Churchill. Ingi also suffers from insomnia, visions of a baghooded witch, crippling guilt and terror that the curse will pass on to his loved ones.
Written and directed by Arró Stefánsson, Óráð is a solid entry in the ‘cursed object’ cycle. The Icelandic setting is fresh, with modern, efficient, slightly soulless homes and a vast expanse of desolate landscape giving the protagonist’s pickle an unusual depth. Jónsson engages the audience because he’s in a bad place because of his own actions – though even that is ultimately debatable – but tries very hard not to give in to self-pity. One of the best little moments comes when he tries the most obvious way of getting out from under, passing on the box, only for a character to act in an unexpected way which prompts him to feel pangs of guilt before realising that the curse isn’t going to let anyone off that easy. It’s a familiar plotline in that MR James manner – aside from the protagonist of ‘Casting the Runes’ has anyone ever escaped a curse in a satisfying plot development? – but the specifics of this version of the story are unusual enough to hold the attention. And it looks and sounds splendid.
The title translates as Wrath, which works better: Delirium is a little too bland and has been used before too often.