Grimmd (2016) Online

The story is eye-catching right from the start. A man walking his dog in the woods outside Reykjavik, Iceland stumbles upon the bodies of two young girls. One has been strangled and the other beaten. Then, pretty quickly, we cut to the heart-wrenching scene where the mother is brought in to identify the bodies of her daughters. Those were sad and powerful scenes. From that point on, the story becomes a fairly standard murder mystery. Who killed the girls? There are a number of possibilities introduced as the local police start checking out known sexual predators (in spite of the fact that neither girl had been sexually assaulted.)

Most of the rest of the movie follows the police investigation, led by Det. Edda. The movie is not really kind to the police on a number of fronts. First, it appears that the police decide who the killer is and then set out to "prove" it and force a confession out of him rather than seriously investigating other possibilities - probably in response to public pressure to find the killers. I also thought it was strange that Edda was assigned to the case and remained on the case even after it became clear that her brother was one of the suspects. Now, I'll concede that the murder rate in Iceland is probably fairly low and so there may not be many detectives with experience with murder investigations - but that still seemed strange, especially after we were let in on the fact that Edda had been essentially harassing a man she had charged with murder years before because she couldn't accept that he had been found not guilty twice! That bothered me a bit. I thought that the story went perhaps a bit too far in trying to keep us guessing - even some of the mother's actions made her seem suspicious. And the ending was unsatisfying to me. I won't give it away, but what happened just left a very bad taste in my mouth. The performances of those playing the police officers were also at times a bit wooden.

There are some very beautiful shots of the skyline of Reykjavik and the surrounding country - which helped lighten the overall very dark mood of the movie and actually has given me something of a desire to visit the city some day. The movie is in Icelandic so I watched it with English subtitles and there were a few times when I found what was happening on the screen interesting enough that I forgot to follow the subtitles, and so I had to go back to catch the dialogue. I take that as a good sign. And, overall, this was a good mystery with its attached narrative of police taking the easy road rather than doing a proper investigation. (7/10)

This was a agony. Not sure were to start. I guess that it all starts with the director. He gets 0 stars. The 1 stars goes to the actors undergoing this ordeal.

The acting is as good as the director allows it to be I guess. So it sucks. The actors try to do there best but there is not to much to work with. They become flat and awkward.

The story starts OK, but has a smell of a copy cat of a American TV show. Then it becomes a cliché.

The storyline is full of holes and doesn't hold.

This is a plot with a good possibility with a bad execution.