Written and Directed by Hilmar Oddsson
Starring Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson, Kristbjörg Kjeld, Hera Hilmar
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes
World Premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival on November 19

by Joe Carlough, Staff Writer

I had the good luck of securing a writing residency last June in Reykjavík, and had a lovely time immersing myself in Icelandic culture. I found a real connection to the art and humor there, so I was quite pleased when Driving Mum, a new Icelandic/Estonian co-production from Iceland’s Ursus Parvus, came through our stack of movies for review. Billed as a “black comedy road trip movie,” Driving Mum offers much more depth than that pithy descriptor might have you believe, though it certainly contains elements of dark humor. I found instead a film steeped in the possibility borne of healing past trauma, reckoning with regret and missteps, and a quiet desperation that evolves into hope, like the first sprout of lupine that grows from the mossy soil atop volcanic earth.

Driving Mum follows Jón Jónsson—a character wonderfully brought to life by Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson—and his mother, whose lives are defined by quietude and daily routine, sitting together and knitting while listening to old radio programs on cassette. On what turns out to be the night of her death, Mamma lets on to Jón her wish to have a photo of herself taken in front of the impressive Gulfoss waterfalls. So the next morning, when he finds she’s passed during the night, he makes her up as best he can in her nice clothing (a little heavy on the lipstick), props up her dead body in the backseat of his car, scoops up his old Pentax camera, some supplies, and his dog Brezhnev, and he and Mamma begin their journey to her final resting place. Along the way, Jón interacts with an unusual cast of characters who are as odd as ordinary folk always are. All the while he argues with the corpse of his mother in the backseat–who, in a fit of magical realism, often opens her eyes and argues back!–revisiting old wounds and finding a sort of peace with his confinement at home with Mamma for the past thirty years.

The film begins with a stark shot: the grasses of the Westfjords in Northwestern Iceland sway gently before the bay and the mountains behind, in gorgeous monochromatic grayscale. The decision to shoot the film in black and white mimics one of Iceland’s more unique landscape elements, the graywash sun that forces itself through often-unrelenting cloud cover. (This setting, and perhaps the mood it imparts to its inhabitants, can be relayed through this personal anecdote: When my plane was touching down in Iceland—in June—the flight attendant spoke through the loudspeaker: “The weather is a cool 42 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is a light rain that should persist throughout the week.” She added drolly: “Welcome to Iceland.”) The grayscale presents itself as a character in the film, a constant drabness laid upon the majestic backdrop of the Icelandic countryside. Even the midnight sun does little to penetrate the colorlessness of Jón’s life, the unchanging light resembles the unchanging quality of Jón’s daily toil. Until this road trip, that is.

Writer and director Hilmar Oddsson delivers numerous moments to laugh throughout Driving Mum, introducing enough comic relief to keep a levity about the film. Though the movie has a bit of a drifting quality, it’s never to its own detriment: the pacing reflects how Jón lives, not tied to the clock but rather letting each task take the time it will take. He doesn’t drive quickly; in fact, he often drives too slowly. He reacts to hitting a dog with his car not with panic or emotion, but instead by accepting an offer of tea and spending whatever time with the dog’s owners as the situation allows. Time is nothing in this movie. The days drift by like the mountains in the rearview mirror, giving the film an overall dreamlike quality that it uses well—though it does leave me wondering about the state his dear mother would have been in, sitting in the back of his car for days on the trip to Gulfoss.

All the while, from somber roadside reflection to an incident of road rage, Mamma’s corpse watches on from the backseat, taunting and humiliating Jón in death as much as she had in life. She’s a great visual metaphor for the voices in our heads that are perfectly attuned to those who have hurt us. A forced arrested development, Jón has a great regret: the loss of a relationship that his parents actively stunted. The defining moment of the film comes when Jón argues with his dead mother in the backseat about the existence of a letter intended for him, decades ago, that she’d hidden from him. It’s the first time in the film that his dead mother–usually sitting stock still and staring forward when she comes to life–looks away from him and shrinks back while he speaks angrily to her. In this moment, she’s more animated than we ever see her in film, including the bits in which she was actually alive. A moment of reckoning, perhaps, when Jon realizes the life he’s lost due to the extent of his mother’s selfishness.

Jón himself, and not to mention his mother, would have you believe that losing his love, Bergdís, a woman too vivacious to be held captive by the countryside in which they grew up, was the defining moment in his life. He places all his trauma, all his sadness and regret, on what could have been. It’s only through losing his mother and loosening the shackles that held him at home for thirty years that Jón’s life, regardless of the bumps and twists still yet to come, begins to unfold.

There is no one defining moment in life, but uncountable defining moments that sway and sputter our lives along, one decision at a time. Luckily for Jón, he has many defining moments left to come to reshape his new life. It reminds me of a saying I heard while in Iceland: You don’t trip over mountains, you trip over the stones along the way.