Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Small-time crooks are par for the course in American indies. But try being a small-time crook in Iceland. Just ponder, for a moment, the diminished options inherent in that dubious career path. Portly, sad-sack David (the droll, poker-faced Petur Johan Sigfusson) is a doormat to his girlfriend and a laughingstock amongst Iceland’s criminal would-be elite. Biding his time as a spectacularly ineffectual debt collector for a local hooligan while harboring secret dreams of becoming a professional poet and kung fu master, David is haunted by flashbacks of childhood trauma and paralytic night terrors.

All this changes when his boozy, depressed landlord Harald (Eggert Thorleiffson) drunkenly puts on airs of being an underworld player. David hatches a scheme that’s half denial and half genius, but nonetheless his status leapfrogs on those Icelandic mean streets––a place where gangsters harbor soft spots for THE LION KING soundtrack, flinching and running away at any mention of murder. Their entire, poorly run operation kicks up to Alexander (played in a very funny cameo by The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli). Director Olaf de Fleur mines a bleak, wintry landscape of deadpan depression and desolation, wrestling painfully awkward laughs from David’s morose existential plight. THE HIGHER FORCE plays out like a Nordic, serio-comic riff on John Cassavetes’ THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, except the Chinese Bookie is now an alcoholic schoolteacher––plus everybody’s sadder, and it’s awfully cold outside.

- Vincent Archer