Echo

A woman, her bed, a mirror , nowhere, a hammer. A circle and 3:32 hour.

'Echo' aka 'Bergmal' doesn't make my best of lists but my predilection for Iceland made it time well spent.Seemingly intermingling fictionalisation and real scenes, it's a montage of never repeated characters involved in everyday life throughout the year, with a Xmas culmination.

Echo opens with a young girl on the street getting a phone call. We only hear her side of it but it is clear that something serious has happened to her father and he has been taken to hospital.

Seventeen year old schoolgirl Caroline receives a phone call that her father has been injured in a motorcycle accident , Seeing her distraught a couple of passer-bys intervene and give her the money for a taxi to hospital . As it transpires Caroline doesn't visit the hospital simply because there has been no accident We've all heard of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf ( Though possibly Bob hasn't ?

Great movie for art lovers. Also for people who thinking about the meaning of life.

"Echo" belongs to two rare genres: vignette movies and non-narrative cinema. Non-narrative, to an extent, since there is no overarching story, no hero (a character never appears twice), no real beginning and no real ending, although this needs to be nuanced as we will see.

Seeing this movie was something of a thrilling ride indeed. It is bleak, depressing and very, very authentic.

You see, the problem with this excellent short horror feature is that the two main female leads have the same face, they could be twins. So, in the end, in the final sequence, I did not know who was who....

Olivia Fougeirol plays Echo, I think. Other characters are an old man who emerges from a pool wearing a loin cloth and a bunch of grapes on a string around his neck, a horned man who speaks in a backwards gibberish and ants come out of his mouth and nose, a naked bearded man standing underneath a tree, other nymph-type friends of Echo in their white gowns, and Keanu Reeves' character - who stands on the top of a hill or by a pool looking curious, or pensive, or just very attractive.