She comes from the land of the ice and snow. We first meet Hera as a 12-year-old on an Icelandic dairy farm. Her beloved older brother wears his Viking tresses long, as any Nordic or metal god should, which proves his undoing. About 10 years later, in the mixtape-cassette early ’90s, Hera (Thora Bjorg Helga) has become the village outcast, tending the cows by day, practicing guitar licks by night. Hera’s parents, more quietly mournful, are baffled. The townsfolk are generally tolerant of Hera’s rages. Everyone expects her to take her dark urges to the big city of Reykjavik, yet she never gets farther than the bus stop.
We can predict that Hera will eventually win over the town and her parents with the power of her music. How Metalhead will get there is more uncertain, this being Icelandic cinema. Writer/director Ragnar Bragason is drawing on his youthful love for Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and company, and there’s an intriguing dissonance between Hera’s anger and the widescreen beauty of what we’ve come to think of as the Land of Bjork. The weirdness of most Icelandic movies—or Bjork’s music, for that matter—springs from the eerie desolation of place and the passionate stoicism of its inhabitants. (This is an island where no one ought to live, yet they do.) Hera’s rebellion is more pat; and she, like the movie, has only one song to play.
There’s a sympathetic priest and a doughy suitor, even the late-film arrival of a band that’s heard Hera’s yowling demo tape, but Hera is the only one who can save herself. Yet instead of sending her on some transformative journey, M
etalhead is more a Kubler-Ross exercise, which makes its heroine more static than she ought to be. I won’t say this is a disservice to metaldom, but Helga (a former law student) certainly has the talent to plumb deeper scripts that this. By turns scathing, wounded, and contrite, the actress conveys an atonal, akimbo soulfulness that, yes, marks her as a true daughter of the Land of Bjork.
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METALHEAD Runs Fri., Feb. 27–Sun., March 1 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 101 minutes.
