Summerland (film)

Synopsis

The main character of the film is Oskar Oskarsson (played by Kjartan Guðjonsson). Oskar’s wife Lara (Olafia Hronn Jonsdottir) is a professional medium and, in the film’s account, is aware of her past lives, able to see and talk to ghosts and to at least perceive the reality of elves. She is self-possessed, benevolent and it is implied that her business working as a medium in the local community, in which Oskar is portrayed merely as an assistant, is a successful one. Meanwhile, Oskar does not believe in elves and does not seem altogether convinced about ghosts. He has taken out a loan secured against the family home to create a tawdry tourist-trap called ‘Ghost House’ in the basement, but the business is not going well. Oskar is portrayed as anxious, and uncomfortable in his own efforts to take on the role of a successful wheeler-dealer. He is unable to admit the family’s impending bankruptcy to Lara, who finds out about it from the spirit of a dead person; ‘við hefðum aldrei att að fara ut i þennan turistabissness’ (‘we should never have gone into this tourist business’), she comments.

Lara and Oskar have two children: the teenager Asdis (Hallfriður Tryggvadottir), who tends to share her father’s pragmatism and scepticism and later proves oblivious to the presence of ghosts, and the young boy Floki (Nokkvi Helgason), who becomes best friends with a boy called Þrandur (Alexander Valur Wiium Brynjolfsson) who turns out to live in the elf-stone in the family’s garden; Floki later also proves able to see and talk to ghosts.

Faced with a forced sale of the house, Oskar agrees without telling Lara to the unexpected offer of an ostentatiously camp, gay German art-collector called Wolfgang Muller (Wolfgang Muller), who is enchanted by Icelanders’ credulity about elves, to buy the elf-stone in Oskar’s garden for €50,000, clearing Oskar’s debts and enabling him to buy an expensive flat-screen television. However, Þrandur disappears and Lara falls into a coma; it later emerges that the vengeful elves have moved to a nearby elf-stone called Grasteinn, taking Lara’s spirit with them.

Meanwhile, the municipal authorities of Kopavogur are planning to sell Grasteinn in order to facilitate a road-widening project, despite mysterious technical problems and Lara’s protestations. Recognising the reality of elves, Oskar and his children join protests at the building of the road; the leader of the protest makes a speech declaring

Oskar lies down in front of a bulldozer whose brakes, implicitly through the intervention of the elves, fail, killing Oskar, whereupon Lara awakes from her coma (somewhat disappointed to find that she has not arrived in Summerland). At Oskar’s funeral, the priest declares

The film ends with Oskar’s ghost returning to his family to continue a happy family life there and to haunt his own ghost-house, while Asis takes over the Ghost House business, which appears now to be a success.

A sub-plot in the film is Asdis’s relationship with Sverrir Þorsteinsson (Snorri Engilbertsson), chairman of the atheist organisation Andtru (Disbelief), whose views are portrayed as extremist.