Once there, Einar dismisses his peculiar message as a drunken rant, a flimsy alibi that doesn’t quite stick with Gunnar. Thinking that his call is a signal of an impending suicide attempt, Gunnar rushes to Einar’s secluded Icelandic holiday house, a small cabin in the middle of a beautiful frosty landscape. Suddenly, he receives a distressing late night call from Einar, whose ambiguous tone suggests untold tragedy when he asks Gunnar “When you wake up in the middle of the night, that there is something with you in the dark?”.
Haunted By LoveĪfter a painful breakup, Gunnar ( Björn Stefánsson) has seemed to move on with his life, discarding all of the memories and records of his ex-boyfriend Einar ( Sigurður Þór Óskarsson) and happily living with a new partner. This all speaks to Erlingur Thoroddsen’s latest film, Rift ( Rokkur), an intriguingly complex romantic drama hidden within the clothes of a mumblegore entry, with the final results defined by which type of entertainment you’re interested in actually watching. Well-known examples of this popular trend include Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way to Die and Ti West’s The Innkeepers, each film favouring intellectual frights rather than loud bangs and dismembered body parts. One of the other key characteristic is employing a one-setting location with a low amount of actors, utilizing more psychological scares and heightened paranoia, as a subtle act of defiance against the jump-scare heavy roller-coaster rides that dominate the mainstream multiplexes. The aspects of Mumblegore include a stronger focus on character rather than the exploitative aspects of the horror genre, such as gore, nudity and excessive murder sequences. As this platform took off, it was a model of narrative delivery that was applied to a variety of other expendable genres, which included the sci-fi, thriller and horror genres, with mumblecore horror titles being labeled “mumblegore”. The word Mumblecore is considered a slur to those who helped popularise the minimalistic filmmaking style, which was a surge of micro-budgeted drama films that focused on realistic dialogue over complex plots, built around small scaled dramatic stories. In the early 2000s, once digital video recording became a significant tool in helping independent cinema gain prominence against the colossal onslaught of studio-funded mainstream entertainment, one of the biggest subgenres to emerge was mumblecore.