Dragonfly
Øyenstikker
***½/****
starring Maria Bonnevie, Kim Bodnia, Mikael Persbrandt, Tintin Anderzon
screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius, based on the short story "Natt Til Mørk Morgen" by Ingvar Ambjørnsen
directed by Marius Holst
by Walter Chaw Marius Holst's haunted Dragonflies is weighted like a Terrence Malick film (or like Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock) by the ominous, oppressive indifference of the Natural. Its drab Scandinavian landscapes as timeless and purposeless as the subterranean tides that govern human behaviour, it's a lovely, poetic thing then when we're introduced to Eddie (Kim Bodnia) floating on a lake and his lover Maria (Maria Bonnevie) wandering through high grass like Ruth lost in alien corn (stark contrasts to Kullman's (Mikael Persbrandt) introduction at a gas station). Essentially a three-person drama, Eddie and Maria live in a red house that rises like an affront from a flat wet marsh–Holst has a laudable comfort with silence and we learn of the couple's contentment in a series of quiet vignettes punctuated by sighs and laughter. When Eddie meets his old pal Kullman in town one day and brings him home to stay, the fragile web holding the two lost souls together begins to separate as the past converges like a Flannery O'Connor plot. Indeed, Dragonflies resembles the Southern Gothic in a great many ways, forging its story from the earth and the grotesqueries of man striving to escape his baser natures. That the film opens and ends with a flow and ebb serves its innate rhythms: now unbearably tense, now lilting and lyrical–always inexorable.
