Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason) is a shy boy from a poorer neighborhood which makes him the perfect target for the bullies at his school.  After suffering severe injuries where his story is highlighted on the evening news, he is transferred and finds himself similarly ostracized by the other boys at the new school.  One afternoon he is approached by Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), and Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) in what initially appears to be a hazing event, but instead grows into the first meeting of what will become a very close-knit group of friends. 

Icelandic writer/director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson premiered his sophomore feature, Beautiful Beings at the 2022 installment of Berlinale where it was picked up by Altered Innocence for state-side distribution, going on to make the long list of International Features for the 95th Academy Awards. During a six-year hiatus after his feature debut, Heartstone (2017), Guðmundsson was focused on production – including Hlynur Pálmason’s rapturously acclaimed Godland (2023) – but he never lost that sense of kinship between adolescents that, while often time only seen in private for fear of ridicule by their peers, is an indelible bond between them.  Running 123 minutes, Beautiful Beings charts a friendship forged in a shared but separate pain of four young boys who are trying their best to grow up and be good people in a world that offers little guidance towards them. 

Ultimately an ensemble piece, the film starts off initially centered around Balli, even though it opens up with a voice-over from Addi.  Pálmason has a difficult role as a boy constantly getting beaten down and as such, does what he can to hide away from his schoolmates. Notably, he still tries to embrace his own uniqueness, as seen when he makes the bold move of wearing his cool leather biker jacket to school one day. As we track this meek and mild boy throughout the course of the narrative, there are glimmers of bright confidence that strike through Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s intentionally dimly lit frames and it is in those moments that the power just a little bit of kindness can have is fully realized as the compassion he is eventually shown by his new friends totally reinvents this boy’s world. The film is not too heavy-handed in the message about the power of friendship, but rather, its themes flow through Balli in showing what he is capable of once he was shown that the power of choice is already within him.  

Beautiful Beings also shares a lot in common thematically with Lukas Dhont’s masterful Close (2022), but breaking Balli away, his arc is very reminiscent of the similarly bullied Oskar’s (Kåre Hedebrant) in Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), and while vampires are notably absent from Guðmundsson’s narrative, it is not devoid entirely of the supernatural. Addi is the one who really brokers this friendship, a boy whose mother is a spiritualist, and while he does not believe or practice, his nights are often interrupted with vivid dreams that seem to spell a message of what is to come. This reoccurring “berdreymi” – or “nightmare,” the literal translation of the title – is the loose framing device that helps to tie the film together into something a little more cohesive and prevents it from being just a tone poem of abandonment and confusion. How much credence the boys put into these feelings is up for debate, mostly on a case-by-case basis, but in a symbolic return, Balli always places his trust in Addi. Bjarkason brings another form of tenderness to the film, a boy at once mature for his age but unarguably still a youth, he slowly begins to take the reins of the narrative as he tempers the flame of anger in Konni, and lends genuine attention to Siggi. 

While there is a clear argument that Addi is the one who holds this group together, they all look to Konni as the de facto leader of the gang. He is, physically, the largest of the four so it makes sense, add to that his unpredictability and daring nature, it makes sense that the boys would fall in line behind him, yet he never uses this against them. At the end of it all, they have fostered a deep trust in one another, even with Balli, who Konni takes a fiercely protective role over when one of the neighborhood boys (Theodór Pálsson) brags about having assaulted Balli. Later, Konni puts Balli in a bath ahead of a group date with some of the girls from school to the lake filling a fathering role that is absent from both of these boys’ lives. These softer moments for the otherwise brash youth really highlight the theme which Guðmundsson has explored in his filmography that despite the harsh environment which often finds young men rudderless and on their own, they can still be capable of great compassion. They are not devoid of a moral compass, but the world forces them to reject this kinder nature in order to survive day to day, and after years of survival they become beasts, but for a few brief years however, they are “beautiful beings.” 

Guðmundsson’s narrative gets a little unwieldy in the final act, sparked by an incident involving Konni and culminating in a confrontation with Balli’s stepfather (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), recently released from prison. The four boys are the pillars of hope for society, but they are far from innocent themselves and Guðmundsson’s script tries at every instance to justify their violence to varying degrees of success. It feels more like he is simply stating the problem – the cycle of violence and poverty that drags a community deeper and deeper with each new generation – without trying to really engage on what can be done about it. Sure, the boys are not capable of re-writing social policy, but that all four of them fall back onto violence, which to be fair is mostly all they have ever known, seems a little reductive and while the script follows all the rules of a good screenplay, it is not as satisfying of a third act given all that came before it. That all four of them succumb may be true to the point which Guðmundsson is making about the rise of crime in Iceland, but the simple arc of angelic Addi who finds himself in a situation of corruption is hardly enough to really land the thesis.  

Beautiful Beings is a flawed film that is greatly supported by a strong cast of young, mostly first-time actors who really sell the emotion of the story. Despite the wispy nature of the opening with Addi’s voiceover and talks of cryptic dreams, the film’s path is very clearly evident and lacks the nuance and surprise present in Heartstone. This is most likely caused by some shortcomings in the ensemble management which is required when doubling the core cast from 2 to 4 and here it finds poor Siggi often pushed aside so that his biggest trouble seen on screen was watching some questionable animie porn. Beautiful Beings is still clearly a work that is focused on a singular vision and Guðmundsson once again shows his skill at bringing stories of outcasts to the screen in powerful and meaningful ways. The film may leave audiences begging for something more, but it is because his cast, specifically Bjarkason and Benediktsson, bring such life to what, in lesser hands, would otherwise be a contrite melodrama about teenaged angst.  We are left expecting a greater resolution that never comes.