44/100
Glad I skipped this at the time (just sampled the opening 10 minutes, 7½ of which are shot in near-total darkness underground), otherwise I might not have seen A White, White Day at TIFF the following year. You can see that Pálmason has a unique sensibility but this early incarnation of it appeals to me barely at all, succeeding mostly in what it pointedly doesn't do, viz. end with the protagonist committing mass murder (which is what numerous scenes of him watching military-training videos and practicing with a semi-automatic rifle he acquires seem to be building toward). Instead it doesn't really seem to land much of anywhere, which is typical of the film's helter-skelter oddity. Despite the title and one big nude sibling wrestling match, it's not really about brothers, focusing intently on anti-social Emil while largely ignoring comparatively ordinary Johan; we gather quickly that the guy's a twitchy weirdo, but his weirdness never develops into much of interest. He's just sort of mildly unpleasant to be around, except right near the end when he performs a couple of magic tricks for the woman he's got a crush on (who tolerates him and fucks his brother). Pálmason does a lot of things here strictly for effect—to the extent that Winter Brothers has any sort of narrative, it involves Emil selling moonshine made from chemicals he and Johan steal from their job (the nature of which I didn't grasp, involves both mining and factory work)...but when his boss (played by Lars Mikkelsen, looking exactly like little brother Mads) discovers that someone who drank the hooch is dying in hospital, we get one of those absurdist scenes in which the authority figure wastes time on an extravagantly pointless ruse before dropping the bomb. Which can kinda work if it's Tarantino writing dialogue for Larry Bishop ("Let's go to the calendar. Calendar time for Buddy"), but is out of place in a context where the obvious steps are firing the employee and calling the police. Unpredictability and open scorn for convention are the film's primary virtues, and I wouldn't have predicted that its writer-director would wed those to something lean and mean and also poignant on his very next try.
(I'm writing the booklet essay for White, White Day's impending Blu-ray, so will be soon be rewatching that as well.)