Surrealistic, absurd, with stains of black humor on white snow, this film by Hlynur Pálmason takes us to a workers’ village in the middle of the forest. Two brothers live here, as you might expect in a fairytale, the younger of which makes moonshine, desperately longs for love and keeps repeating that everyone has a dark side.

Here, the metaphor for that dark side is a mine, where headlamps barely break through the darkness while tension slowly simmers between the laboring men. Visual, surprising and with intensively powerful images, Winter Brothers is about what is hidden deep within: rivalry, aggression, and desire for revenge, all of which hurt and destroy when released from the deep shafts of the human soul. But it’s also about everything that can push back that darkness.