Direction: Runar Runarsson
Country: Iceland
The plotless Echo presents us a succession of 56 observant and unrelated vignettes shot mostly with non-professional actors that attempts to illustrate the Icelandic modern society through people’s experiences and behaviors around Christmas time. The film sometimes plays like a poignant drama, other times like a droll comedy, and some others like an intimate, comfortable installment where nothing much is going on.
Writer-director Runar Runarsson confirms the potentialities showed with Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015), and gets us pulled into fragments of human life that work better globally than individually. This interesting idea ended up with a competent execution, with episodes of varying duration flowing at a nearly-pendular pulse and cohering in a final intelligible way. Their development may be short but there’s a sense of freedom that I like in the film.
Constantly on the move, this Roy Andersson-inspired mosaic (without the eccentricities) found a subtle, almost delicate way to convey happiness, sadness, trauma, conflict, forgiveness, loneliness, social problems, aging, disappointment, frustration, beliefs and hope. It’s a different Christmas turned never-boring cinematic promenade that resulted more satisfactory than what was initially thought.
