Rift tells a haunted tale of isolation in Iceland

An enticing, well-acted and expertly-directed mystery-thriller, the Icelandic film Rift will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Paying homage to classic horror films like Robert Wise’s The Haunting and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, writer/director Erlingur Thoroddsen has created something genuinely suspenseful. The movie was a hit on the film festival circuit – not just LGBT film festivals, but general horror film festivals as well, where it has earned great reviews.

Gunnar (Björn Stefánsson) receives a strange phone call from his ex-boyfriend, Einar (Sigurður Þór Óskarsson), months after they parted ways. Einar sounds distraught – like he’s about to do something terrible to himself – so Gunnar drives to the secluded cabin where Einar is holed up and soon discovers there is more going on than he imagined. As the two come to terms with their broken relationship, some other person seems to be lurking outside the cabin, wanting to get in.

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Throwback Thursday: Death in Venice

Based on the classic novella by Thomas Mann, this late-career masterpiece from the great Luchino Visconti is a meditation on the nature of art, the allure of beauty, and the inescapability of death.

 

A fastidious composer reeling from a disastrous concert, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde, in an exquisitely nuanced performance) travels to Venice to recover. There, he is struck by a vision of pure beauty in the form of a young boy named Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), his infatuation developing into an obsession even as rumors of a plague spread through the city.

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