It is impossible to watch writer/director Marsibil Saemundardottir’s short film FREYJA without thinking of the early films of Roman Polanski—the syrup thick atmosphere (syrup and glass shards, to be more directly evocative) the unnerving, claustrophobic tension, and the sense of alien-ness to every object of familiarity, banal reality turned grotesque and hobgoblin without changing shape or being tarted up in gimmick. In the ten minute run time, there is such immense respect to each atom of the cinema that the minimal becomes excruciatingly maximal, each spec a haunt, each moment somehow the sum total of ten of the film entire, and then some. I found myself tempted to say it is “deceptively simple” but decide this is not true—one, because it would suggest there is some game-play at work in the film where there is none, and two because it would discount the majesty of the fact that it is, in fact, flatly, aggressively simple and if anything the piece showcases how “simple” is not slight. The film is glorious in its simplicity and trust of the language of cinema, is a case-study in not only “less is more” but “less is Everything.”
One of the deftest maneuvers of the film is in the subtle double-use of each and every of its only several camera set-ups. Each serves, at once, as a perfectly voyeuristic, forced-angle, play-with-light-and-dark rendering that puts the viewer in the increasingly unnerved mindset of the central character (that is, makes it feel that we are her, being watched) while at the same time thrusts (mostly unconsciously, but all the more devastatingly for this to a viewer who finds themselves made complicit in such a sneaky way) the viewer in to the position of being the interloping presence this character feels encroaching, strangling in on her: We, the Audience, not only know due to the fact that we are watching a work of cinema that there is “something else there with her” but, wanting to or not, FEEL the knowledge, the certainty of this because we, by our presence, are it, embody it, and so feel a sickening sense of approaching delight in our eventual decent and capture/obliteration of the character. Indeed, we would be not only disappointed, narratively, if the film did not reach its inevitable conclusion, but Personally, as our hand, ready and willing to play the part of the somehow omniscient victimizer, would have been stayed, our mouths unbloodied, our guts not turned gulity.
In the short run time and stark use of select images, the film crackles with the power of the minimalist and in so achieves one of the purest goals of cinema: its sparse, exacting telling (without expositional detail to lean against) allows it to create true moments which can immediately be recognized as Iconic. Indeed, each shot skirts the edge of this—a full personality and entire art piece to each little shave of sequence—so that when the image that Is the film arrives it has earned itself a history, an instant recognition as “that moment that is now a fully enveloped memory to the viewer.” That image? The central character, Freyja, having closed herself in the cabinet, the telephone off the hook, cord dangling off from the counter in the foreground; Freyja filmed from carpet level struggling to open slowly enough the door to not produce the grating, high pitch squeaks that cannot be stopped or reduced, that announce her (and the child in her belly’s) vulnerability to the at once wide and narrow confines of the house we as audience/monster have become familiar is Icon, is eternal, is the still frame as though plucked from a nightmare, the felt/experienced memory of personal horror and trespass most certain to return to a a viewer’s idly thoughts again and again in life. The build of the film to this, its small, genuinely disquieting moments leading up to this flagrant image of “doom and desperation” (not to mention symbolic value—Freyja, with child, confined to a space wherein she can sparsely fit, womb-like, and unable to escape for herself without sounding the call of her own undoing and that of her true vulnerability within her, her mortality and immortality both to be obliterated at once) is so graceful it cannot but be met with an admiring regard on the part of the very entity that will ultimately pounce—and so the shot lingers, we as audience in equal parts in awe of beautiful vulnerability and tongue licking at our own hungry teeth to move to the undoing we await.
Indeed, even the coda of the film (switching from black-and-white to color) is immaculately doubled in its import. Flashing the viewer ahead a number of years to make explicit what the final moment of the interloper’s decent toward Freyja meant, while also leaving it mysterious (that is: ambiguity has been removed, but not finality) at once allows the viewer a sense of closure, narratively, but to (even with a pang, perhaps, of sick-at-our pleasure in the enjoyment) be victorious is our shared role as intruder, annihilator. We know we succeeded and remain unknown, that the experience we had belongs to us and becomes our secret to keep.
A spectacularly, chilling bit of cinema, Freyja was my personal favorite offering from the films I was able to take in at the Viewster Online film Fest 3. A true masterpiece, in all respects, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Information on the film can be found here: FREYJA.
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