Summerland (film)

Summerland (Icelandic: Sumarlandið) is an 80-minute 2010 Icelandic film, written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson, released by Blueeyes Productions/Sögn ehf.

The film is set in Kópavogur, a suburb of Reykjavík strongly associated with urban legends about elves. The film takes its name from the place where spirits are said by one of the protagonists to go after death, a term attested more generally in Icelandic spiritualism.

The main character of the film is Óskar Óskarsson (played by Kjartan Guðjónsson). Óskar’s wife Lára (Ólafía Hrönn Jónsdóttir) is a professional medium and, in the film’s account, is aware of her past lives, able to see and talk to ghosts and to at least perceive the reality of elves. She is self-possessed, benevolent and it is implied that her business working as a medium in the local community, in which Óskar is portrayed merely as an assistant, is a successful one. Meanwhile, Óskar does not believe in elves and does not seem altogether convinced about ghosts. He has taken out a loan secured against the family home to create a tawdry tourist-trap called ‘Ghost House’ in the basement, but the business is not going well. Óskar is portrayed as anxious, and uncomfortable in his own efforts to take on the role of a successful wheeler-dealer. He is unable to admit the family’s impending bankruptcy to Lára, who finds out about it from the spirit of a dead person; ‘við hefðum aldrei átt að fara út í þennan túristabissness’ (‘we should never have gone into this tourist business’), she comments.

Lára and Óskar have two children: the teenager Ásdís (Hallfríður Tryggvadóttir), who tends to share her father’s pragmatism and scepticism and later proves oblivious to the presence of ghosts, and the young boy Flóki (Nökkvi Helgason), who becomes best friends with a boy called Þrándur (Alexander Valur Wiium Brynjólfsson) who turns out to live in the elf-stone in the family’s garden; Flóki later also proves able to see and talk to ghosts.

Faced with a forced sale of the house, Óskar agrees without telling Lára to the unexpected offer of an ostentatiously camp, gay German art-collector called Wolfgang Muller (Wolfgang Müller), who is enchanted by Icelanders’ credulity about elves, to buy the elf-stone in Óskar’s garden for €50,000, clearing Óskar’s debts and enabling him to buy an expensive flat-screen television. However, Þrándur disappears and Lára falls into a coma; it later emerges that the vengeful elves have moved to a nearby elf-stone called Grásteinn, taking Lára’s spirit with them.

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Wikipedia