Rams

Like an over­sized beige jumper with ​’70s-style criss-cross pat­terns across the chest, Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams is a bit too wool­ly for its own good. When the film starts, it announces itself as a dry com­e­dy, intro­duc­ing the pro­longed sib­ling rival­ry between Gum­mi (Sig­urður Sigurjónsson) and Kid­di (Theodór Júlíusson). The broth­ers live as neigh­bours, both with mighty, ruff-like beards and both sheep farm­ers who have man­aged to pass the last 40 years with­out utter­ing a word to one another.

Any triv­ial bureau­cra­cy between the pair is tend­ed to with the help of Kiddi’s note-deliv­er­ing mutt and a com­ic appro­pri­a­tion of bark­ing nois­es. When they head on their trail bikes to a local live­stock com­pe­ti­tion, each with their prize ram in tow, there’s the sug­ges­tion that the film will be con­cerned with the quaint tra­di­tions of Iceland’s rur­al farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty. A female vet judges the rams, her mod­ern meth­ods paint­ing her as an out­sider. Gum­mi los­es to his broth­er and, sour in defeat, secret­ly breaks into Kiddi’s sheep shed to inspect the spec­i­men that best­ed his prize ram by a mere half mark.

In doing so, he uncov­ers a poten­tial out­break of scrapie, a rare and con­ta­gious degen­er­a­tive dis­or­der found in sheep and goats. To pre­serve the future of Ice­landic sheep farm­ing, all flocks must be oblit­er­at­ed. Yet instead of accept­ing this unfor­tu­nate turn of events as fate deal­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly cru­el hand, Kid­di blames his broth­er for this mess, turn­ing to drink and mak­ing a habit of falling asleep in the snow.

Though it’s fair­ly obvi­ous how the film is going to play out (and, sad­ly, it plays out exact­ly as expect­ed), Rams spends far too long dawdling when it comes to the mat­ter of set­tling on its tone. There are moments that stray dan­ger­ous­ly close to humour, though it’s nev­er real­ly that fun­ny. It some­times looks like a soap opera in the vein of BBC Radio’s ​‘The Archers’, with lots of harumph­ing farm­ers whin­ing about their sor­ry lot. But inter­est in plac­ing the broth­ers’ with­in the con­text of the wider com­mu­ni­ty wanes until it ends up being used as a cheap plot device.

Or could this sto­ry of peo­ple sud­den­ly los­ing the entire means of their well­be­ing be a metaphor for Iceland’s bank­ing col­lapse? Maybe for the first half, but cer­tain­ly not the sec­ond. There are even hints that mat­ters might boil over and turn into a west­ern-like thriller, with shot­guns, spades and crow­bars thrown into the mix. But no, it’s not that either. So to quote The Simp­sons’ Moe Szys­lak, ​“If you’re so sure what it ain’t, how about tellin’ us what it am.” Frankly, there’s no obvi­ous answer.

Rams is all over the shop, but maybe it’s to be com­mend­ed for refus­ing to set­tle on a sin­gle emo­tion­al reg­is­ter. The one thing that sticks in the craw, how­ev­er, is that it does lack a cer­tain com­pas­sion for its char­ac­ters, and while Hákonarson just about holds back from open­ly mock­ing the broth­ers’ pover­ty, he does por­tray them as bum­bling tyros out to sat­is­fy their pet­ty self-inter­ests. The rea­son for the vendet­ta is even­tu­al­ly revealed as being suit­ably banal, fur­ther cement­ing the writer/director’s feel­ing that rur­al folk are child­ish and irra­tional and should be left to their own devices.