This is an eccentric tragicomic film from Iceland that delivers exactly what its title says and what it shows on the poster. This delightful gem of a film is very short and has very minimal dialogue but is nevertheless packed full of surprises and shocks. I suspect that its depiction of rural life in Iceland is more mythological than real and its insouciance towards grievous injury and death highly affected. However, authentic or not, it is wonderfully entertaining and original.

This film is essentially a collection of separate stories that are only loosely connected, all of which are set in a sparsely populated valley in Iceland where the residents all raise horses. In one story, a man dresses up and rides his horse to a neighbor’s house for breakfast and she is happy to be wooed. However his horse is a mare and in heat, exciting the stallion owned by the woman. As he is leaving, the stallion breaks out of its enclosure and mounts the mare, while the man is still riding on it, causing him a great deal of embarrassment. What’s more is that this event is watched by many of the other residents of the valley, many of whom spend their time using binoculars to see what their neighbors are up to. Meanwhile another valley resident is late to meet a ship at the port. Seeing that it has already left, he takes extraordinary measures to catch up with it. The other stories are in a similar vein, combining some comedy and tragedy and all involve horses in some way.

Especially for us city folk, this film is a real delight. I especially appreciated that even as it proudly shows off the amazing landscape of the valley and what one can call an idyllic lifestyle alongside the horses, it also gently mocks the highly insular nature of their community and doesn’t shy away from the physical dangers of this kind of life. It also cleverly plays with our expectations. After being primed by watching a couple of people die in mishaps and one suffering a grievous injury, we expect the worst when a young woman tries to corral a group of horses all on her own. That’s why I say that this film is full of surprises and I love how it efficiently tells its stories with almost no dialogue. When the man in the first story continues to stay away from the woman, perhaps because he doesn’t want to reminded about how his masculinity has been bruised, she hatches a plan of her own to get him to come back by making things even. She begins by getting her poor stallion castrated, but that is just the first step and we can understand the logic in her plan without her having to spell it out in words at all.

I’d bet that there are some subtle undercurrents in this film that I didn’t quite get. There seems to be some digs at the Swedish for example which I didn’t understand and the man in the first story doesn’t seem to be a local as he seems to be less familiar with horses than the others. Then there’s the bit about the man who is upset about a landowner erecting a fence to block riders from crossing his land and I know enough about such rules from other countries to understand that right of way is real. Overall it’s hard to say how authentic this all is supposed to be from an outsider’s perspective especially as there is definitely a tongue-in-cheek tone throughout. But this definitely is a highly original film that is just great fun, provided of course that you mind the sight of giant horse penises.