UNDER THE TREE: Jet-black Icelandic Comedy Where The Laughs Are Lost In Translation

Iceland is such a small country that none of its filmmakers could be accused of being part of a shared cinematic movement – largely, they are bonded by sharing the same crew members due to the minuscule populace of the country, and even they are often being pulled away by Hollywood productions in Iceland’s most remote locations. If there is a single identifying characteristic bonding the most high profile Icelandic films of recent memory together, then it’s the reliance on dry, deadpan humour, presented here in its most pitch black state by director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson.

Under the Tree, his third feature to date, was Iceland’s submission for the foreign language Oscar in the recent awards season, where it understandably failed to make the shortlist. Academy voters aren’t prone to awarding comedy at the best of times – and Sigurðsson’s muddled execution in terms of storytelling, under utilising the aspects relevant to the premise in favour of a side plot with a pay-off that feels inconsequential, proves that his film really is no laughing matter.

Unfocused storytelling makes for inconsistent laughter

Atli (Steinþór Hróar Steinþórsson) is caught by his wife Agnes (Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir) watching a porn video showing him cheating, which leads to him getting thrown out of the family home and deprived of regular contact with his young daughter. He moves back in with his parents (Sigurður Sigurjónsson and Edda Björgvinsdóttir), but instead of returning to a more stable family unit, he soon discovers that they have entered into a spat with their next door neighbours, who can’t sunbathe due to the large shadow the tree in the opposite garden casts. What begins as a passive aggressive disagreement eventually turns violent, with consequences that should be pretty obvious to anybody taking note of the various plot contrivances presented here.

Sigurðsson spends more time focusing on the fallout from the son’s breakup than he actually does building the characters in the central dispute the film is named after. Despite the heightened nature of the plot, it is commendable that he keeps proceedings dryly comic instead of preferring more overblown set pieces to compliment the spiralling relations – but it offers the cumulative effect of a shrug, as the central characters within this dispute aren’t developed to become anything more than mere archetypes.

You get the sense that Sigurðsson would have preferred to make a comedy about a father’s pathetic attempts to stay in his daughter’s life after a break-up of his own making, as there is a noted disinterest in dedicating the appropriate amount of time to the plot the story is centred around.

This isn’t a case of laughs getting lost in translation, as the set up is broad and devoid of any specific cultural nuance. Instead, the lack of laughs is largely attributed to a screenplay (co-written with Huldar Breiðfjörð) that feels like a first draft; one that has a firm hand on the required narrative beats that will progress the story, but without the laughs or character development that would help elevate it beyond being an adequate example of plot structure.

Chekhov’s Tree

By a certain point in the brief runtime, it becomes apparent that the high concept isn’t the only thing struggling to sustain itself, as the aforementioned side plot about a deadbeat dad weaselling his way back into his family’s lives begins to repeat the same jokes over and over again. The (master) debate over whether Atli was caught masturbating over a porn video he starred in, or was merely just about to, becomes a recurring gag with seemingly more screen time devoted to it then any single aspect of the rivalry between the neighbouring couples.

You’d expect escalating tensions on both sides of the fence to be pivotal to the black comic setup – and yet, time and time again, Sigurðsson completely misses the mark when it comes to basic comic storytelling.

The other issue is how Sigurðsson frequently over telegraphs specific plot occurrences to overcompensate for the lack of attention they’ve been given when writing them into the story at hand. There will be few plot devices this year as sweaty (a term used on the brilliant podcast Blank Check when referring to nonsensical storytelling that a film forces the audience to buy into) as Atli choosing to camp out in his parents’ garden beside the tree instead of inside the house, for reasons that are glaringly obvious to anybody who understands basic storytelling. Of course, this is handled in such an illogical manner, even Chekhov would disown it as an example of his gun theory.

Conclusion: Under the Tree

It’s hard to delve deeper into Under the Tree when all of the problems stem from the failure to properly establish what should be the centre of the story. Sigurðsson’s film is consistently frustrating and close to devoid of any laughs whatsoever – a tantalising black comic premise wasted due to lazy screenwriting and an ensemble of seemingly indifferent performers.

Under the Tree was released in the US on July 6, 2018 and in the UK on August 10, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.