"Beautiful Beings" - Film Review
Iceland’s submission to the 95th Academy Awards is a coming-of-age drama. Beautiful Beings centers on Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason), a fourteen-year-old boy who is constantly bullied and beaten up at school. He has no friends and his home life is equally isolating. Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason) belongs to a trio of rowdy boys who spend their time picking fights. The most violent among them is Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson). Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) is the clown, and Addi tries to keep some semblance of self-control to guide the group. Addi sees a hospitalized Balli on the news in a piece about the rising violence among youths and decides to bring Balli into his group of friends.
Beautiful Beings balances its intense violence with acts of kindness that feel as though they belong in a movie with characters who have never known harshness. At the same time, the violence is sometimes difficult to watch; brutal, angry fights that come from a place of insecurity. These teenage boys don’t know how to exist without violence, without trading punches to show off their strength, their loyalty, their commitment to their friends.
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In no way does Beautiful Beings glorify these acts of violence. Instead, the film simply presents them starkly as fact. This is a reality, one that shouldn’t be lusted after, but it is a way of life that feels inescapable and inevitable to the boys. At around the thirty-minute mark, Addi talks about the home lives of his bully friends. It’s here that audiences get a fuller picture of these characters. Again, never in a way that excuses their violent behavior, but demonstrating how the people who are supposed to care for them have fundamentally failed these boys. They are desperate to feel in control of some tiny facet of their lives, and since violence is how the men in their lives show power, they do the same. Beautiful Beings is an indictment of this cycle of violence, and proof of how the smallest acts of kindness can begin to disrupt that pattern.
The film is supplemented with supernatural elements that don’t feel necessary to the larger themes. Addi’s mom (Anita Briem) believes she’s psychic and visits Addi in his dreams from time to time. These forays into the otherworldly don’t entirely hinder the pacing and character development, but they don’t help it either. The four lead boys (three of whom had no prior acting experience) are more than capable of grounding the film in earnestness. Their evolution and the tangled web they weave are compelling in their own right.
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Beautiful Beings does stumble somewhere around the two-thirds mark with a scene of one of the boys being raped. In a film with so much violence, this scene is gratuitous, especially given the homophobic slurs that are freely tossed around throughout the rest of the movie. More egregiously, the scene doesn’t serve a narrative purpose and exists more as shock value. The audience doesn’t need that scene to understand that the film is recklessly speeding toward a violent end. We’re well aware of that.
Despite its anger, Beautiful Beings remains deeply hopeful. The boys offer kindness to one another in ways they don’t experience from anyone else. They don’t always go about things in the right way, but they are trying to make sense of their lives and be better than the people who failed to raise them in a tender world. The kids aren’t alright, but they were never given the space to be alright.
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