This Icelandic horror film was released in the UK a few months after its Iceland release. I don’t remember noticing the release (StudioCanal straight to DVD?) and I also missed its BBC transmission. It’s still available on iPlayer for another week and I’m glad I managed to catch it. (Just Watch suggests it is available to watch on several streamers.) The BBC handles relatively few foreign language films these days and it doesn’t promote them very well. My only real purchase on this film was through its source material, a 2010 novel by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, who is one of the best known and most celebrated contemporary Icelandic writers. Many of her books are available in the UK in translation. Mostly she is known for crime fiction and children’s fiction. I Remember You is described as a ‘standalone’ thriller. Her crime novels comprise two series, one featuring a lawyer and one a psychologist. Some of the crime novels have shades of horror about them but I Remember You is much more a crime fiction/mystery/horror mix – at least in its film adaptation, I haven’t read the original.

Freyr and Dagný examine the corpse of the hanged woman

The genre elements in the story are familiar, especially in an Icelandic or more broadly Nordic context. The fate of small children in a hostile environment and in remote communities crops up in several crime fictions, sometimes with almost mythical links to Norse storytelling. In this film the focus is on a small community across the fjord from a larger settlement. The community goes back a long way and the narrative spans 60-70 years. It is one of those narratives which switches between time periods without clear signalling for the viewer. In what appears to be the present, a local hospital doctor, Freyr (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), who works as a psychiatrist, is called to a church where the body of an older woman has been found. The church has been defiled and the woman has been hanged. Or is it a suicide? The psychiatrist’s son went missing three years earlier and when it appears that there is some connection between the woman and his son’s disappearance he begins to investigate alongside local police detective Dagný (Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir). A second narrative strand involves a trio of thirty-somethings(?), a couple and a second woman, who arrive in the area seeking to renovate an old house that has been empty for many years. They hope to create a property to let during the summer season. The old building will turn out to be haunted in some way. I don’t want to spoil the narrative any further so I’ll move on to more general observations.

Katrín looks out from the house she is renovating – faces at the window are key genre images

Iceland is a country with a small population, barely enough people to fill a medium-sized city in most of Europe. But it’s quite a large island so population density is very low. Remote communities are likely to be small with potential internal conflicts not easily detectable from outside. The small population numbers however mean that the records of the population are more manageable than in larger communities. Stories that involve lost children are not unusual. Events long ago can perhaps be more important when communities are more isolated. Children are important characters in a host of horror stories as well as crime stories. They invoke intense emotions for parents and they also generate ideas about innocence but also susceptibility to evil – they are perhaps more open to suggestion, but also to paranormal forces. I Remember You is primarily a ghost story and those images of small figures glimpsed out of the corner of an eye or suddenly appearing and disappearing behind buildings or rocks on the hillside, familiar from other films of the genre, are a feature of this film.

Ghostly figures are briefly glimpsed . . .

I think the film generally succeeds as a mystery and a ghost story. It does need ‘work’ to read the narrative and I certainly struggled over several sections. I’m not sure if it is easier for horror fans to follow because of the conventions it uses. It does offer thrills and chills even if you aren’t sure what is going on, but if you follow the narrative carefully and try to work out the time shifts (and the geography of the area) you will get a richer experience. Having said that I think I am still puzzling over parts of the plotting. The contemporary reviews I’ve read all explicitly link the film to ‘Nordic noir’. The Guardian‘s not particularly helpful review even goes to the extent of citing the knitwear as a significant genre element – while dismissing the ghost story. I found American reviews to be much more appreciative. It is much more concerned with the ghost story than with police work.

Director and co-writer Óskar Thór Axelsson has directed on two series of the excellent police procedural Trapped. For I Remember You he is supported by suitably dark and chilling cinematography from Jakob Ingimundarson. The cast is also a major asset. I’m always impressed in Icelandic films and TV by the quality of the performances. There are several cast members I’ve seen in other Icelandic films/TV series. The music by Frank Hall is suitably generic for this kind of horror. The trailer below gives much more plot information and the film’s opening credit sequence shows many scenes from the whole narrative, much like the pre-credits sequences of some TV serials. However, I suspect that you will still be trying to figure out what is going on by the end of the film. On reflection, I think this is a rich text in terms of storytelling and one which repays a second viewing.