Natatorium is a female-centred, atmospheric thriller debut with its world premiere at the IFFR for Iceland’s Helena Stefánsdóttir.
Not drowning but waving
by Alexa DalbyNatatorium
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
This is the weirdest film I’ve ever seen.
Natatorium is a very female-centred film. It’s the debut feature for experimental choreographer, director and screenwriter Helena Stefánsdóttir and it has a female film crew. The Icelandic production company is Bjartsýn Films (meaning Optimistic). Its aim is to produce female-driven quality content with artistic integrity.
Stefánsdóttir has a wonderful visual sense, as we see in her creation of a house that seems like a murky underwater world. The director of cinematography is award-winning Kerttu Hakkarainen. There’s also a beautiful long shot of a bus making its way through the rocky Icelandic landscape.
As well as the female crew, Natatorium also features suspenseful, ambigous performances – despite the hard-to-interpret screenplay – by three generations of actresses.
The premise is this: Lilja (lmur María Arnarsdóttir), a young cello player, comes to the capital to audition and innocently arranges to stay with her grandparents, who apparently have been estranged from the rest of the family for years. Lilja seems unaware of this family rift. Is it because it’s never talked about? Her grandmother has strange, religious practices but this doesn’t seem a problem yet. Exploring her grandparents’ rambling house, which plays a major part in the film, she discovers an alluring, cave-like basement swimming pool. The soundtrack of dripping water and the moody half-light reinforce the sensation of menace.
When Lilja’s absent father Magnus (Arnar Dan Kristjánsson) learns where she is, panic ensues (we don’t find out why yet) and he sends his younger sister, alcoholic herbal pharmacist and self-identified witch Vala (Stefanía Berndsen, A White, White Day) to the house. In one of the bedrooms is her twin, another sibling Kalli (Jónas Alfreð Birkisson), a skeletal, bed-ridden invalid of Christ-like appearance with a mysterious lung disease, who his mother, Lilja’s grandmother (Elin Petersdottir, Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga), tends to. We learn Lilja is named after another sister who died but how is never mentioned.
The atmosphere in the outwardly normal family gathering that results is incredibly tense throughout, although Magnus’s pregnant new (strikingly normal) girlfriend Irena (Kristín Pétursdóttir) is oblivious. It’s only when siblings talk to each other alone that secrets start to be hinted at but never explained. Everything is elliptical, we never know anything explicitly. The uneasy conclusion comes shockingly. The recurring image, as well as of dripping water, is of goldfish swimming round a glass bowl.
The eerie music score by Jacob Groth signals alarm and danger throughout. The film maybe has too many strands of different types of family dysfunction and addiction so as to seem rather overloaded.
Natatorium is heavily atmospheric and it looks beautiful. It’s a very strange mystery and psychological drama: a highly interesting first film.
Natatorium has its world premiere in the Bright Future section, for promising young directors, of the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) on 28 January 2024. It will screen at SXSW in March 2024.
