Beautiful Beings [Berdreymi] **** (2022, Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) – Classic Movie Review 13,438
Panorama of Reykjavik.
The rough, raw and real 2022 Icelandic coming-of-age drama film Beautiful Beings [Berdreymi] is set in the 2000s in the suburbs of Reykjavík, where violence surrounds a small gang of teenage boys.
Writer/ director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s rough, raw and real 2022 Icelandic coming-of-age drama film Beautiful Beings (Icelandic: Berdreymi) is set in the 2000s in the suburbs of Reykjavík, Iceland’s capital, where a group of teenage boys are surrounded by violence.
Birgir Dagur Bjarkason stars as Addi, a gifted teenage boy raised by a clairvoyant mother who considers herself psychic and believes in ‘the subconscious’, decides to befriend a bullied misfit kid called Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason) and take him into his little group of violent misfits.
Balli lives with his drug-addicted mother (Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir) in a squalid house, is bullied by his classmates, and has a brutal stepfather who has left him with a glass eye.
Addi’s friendship means that for the first time in his life, Balli feels able to connect, especially of course with Addi. Left to their own devices, the four boys – also Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson) and Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) – discover aggression and violence, but also loyalty and love, as true friendship develops.
Addi’s visions suggest that Balli’s brutal stepfather can no longer be tolerated. But, as the troubles of the gang of outsiders escalate towards the life threatening, Addi listens to his inner voice and manages to find his own path with the help of his mother (Aníta Briem) and his new friend Balli.
The provocative, challenging writing is excellent and the natural seeming performances are superlative, especially by Birgir Dagur Bjarkason and Áskell Einar Pálmason as troubled but tenacious Addi and Balli. Chilly but incisive, Beautiful Beings [Berdreymi] is an impressive, involving, worthwhile film, which manages to be realistic and poetic as well, with its rich and strange other-worldly dimension.
It won the Premio della Critica Italiana SNCCI at the 2021 Biografilm International Film Festival in Bologna, Italy, dedicated to biographies, documentaries, and life stories.
On 30 September 2022, the film was announced as Icelandic’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson is also the director of Heartstone [Hjartasteinn] (2016).
© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,438
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