Kissed by Winter

REVIEW
Parents often think they are always right, particularly when they are wrong, and this is the provocative theme of Norwegian filmmaker Sara Johnson’s astonishing debut movie. Her film insightfully examines several parent-child relationships, the most prominent of which involves Victoria (the remarkable Swedish actress Annika Hallin, who should become an international star after this), a doctor who often took on the role of “bad cop” with her son Sune. After the death of little Sune, the guilt-wracked Victoria abandons her husband and subsequently loses herself in the role of Norwegian country doctor. But this is no escape: each child she treats feels like Sune and when a Muslim teenager is tragically killed - perhaps due to the abuse of his refugee father - the tormented Victoria punishes herself by obsessively sleuthing in order to indict the dead boy’s father. The film is all about Victoria’s struggle with the revelation that she was a bad parent, but Johnson never goes for the obvious. Instead, she has created a work of staggering delicacy and empathy. Her film is tight, economical, beautifully played by a gifted cast and photographed (by Odd Reinhardt Nicolaysen) in a series of overcast, dark colors that keep the story dangerously self-contained, effectively conveying the self-induced suffocation that Victoria is experiencing. Keeping Kissed by Winter from being a completely one-character film are the vignettes involving the local cop investigating the boy’s death, and the young father whose snow plow inadvertently buried the body. (Norwegian with English subtitles)