Don’t expect Baltasar Kormákur to turn up on the Christmas card list of the Icelandic tourist board any time soon. Previously best known for 101 Reykjavik, his portrait of the booze-fuelled slacker culture in the capital city, Kormákur returns with Jar City, an atmospheric police procedural full of scorched sheep heads, pickled babies’ brains and ice – and that’s just for lunch.

Based on one of a popular series of crime novels by Arnaldur Indriðason, Jar City is a uniquely Icelandic work – as dark and brooding as the long winter nights, it is also infused with a sardonic northern humour as sour as fermented shark and so understated that you almost miss it.

Crucially, the murder investigation at the centre of the film takes place on an island, the population of which hovers around 300,000. Everyone knows about the crime, and a fair proportion of the locals could be considered suspects. Detective Erlendur (a tremendous, glowering turn from Ingvar E. Sigurðsson) has to contend with the local criminal element flaunting their knowledge of his own unravelling family life – his daughter is a pregnant, heroin-addicted former prostitute.

The story starts with the discovery of the body of an elderly man in a malodorous basement. Meanwhile, Örn (Atli Rafn Sigurðsson), mourns the four-year-old daughter he lost to a rare congenital disease with a fierceness that borders on obsession. These seemingly disparate story lines gradually weave together with a slow, deliberate precision – although so entirely unrelated are the two strands that it’s obvious that Örn must have some link to the dead man.

It’s a terrific piece of direction from Kormákur. Everything, from the look of the film (a frosted half-light that lends a chilly beauty to the bleak, often rather sordid, locations) to the brilliantly unsettling use of food as a recurring motif (the image of Erlendur prising the eyeball out of his sheep’shead supper is one that will stay with me far longer than I would like it to) is judged perfectly.

15, 94 minutes

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