Summerland is an 80-minute 2010 Icelandic film, written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson, released by Blueeyes Productions/Sögn ehf. The film is set in Kópavogur, a suburb of Reykjavík strongly associated with urban legends about elves. The film takes its name from the place where spirits are said by one of the protagonists to goafter death, a term attested more generally in Icelandic spiritualism.
Synopsis
The main character of the film is Óskar Óskarsson. Óskar's wife Lára is a professional medium and, in the film's account, is aware of her past lives, able to see and talk to ghosts and to at least perceive the reality of elves. She is self-possessed, benevolent and it is implied that her business working as a medium in the local community, in which Óskar is portrayed merely as an assistant, is a successful one. Meanwhile, Óskar does not believe in elves and does not seem altogether convinced about ghosts. He has taken out a loan secured against the family home to create a tawdry tourist-trap called ‘Ghost House’ in the basement, but the business is not going well. Óskar is portrayed as anxious, and uncomfortable in his own efforts to take on the role of a successful wheeler-dealer. He is unable to admit the family's impending bankruptcy to Lára, who finds out about it from the spirit of a dead person; ‘við hefðum aldrei átt að fara út í þennan túristabissness’, she comments. Lára and Óskar have two children: the teenager Ásdís, who tends to share her father's pragmatism and scepticism and later proves oblivious to the presence of ghosts, and the young boy Flóki, who becomes best friends with a boy called Þrándur who turns out to live in the elf-stone in the family's garden; Flóki later also proves able to see and talk to ghosts. Faced with a forced saleof the house, Óskar agrees without telling Lára to the unexpected offer of an ostentatiously camp, gay German art-collector called Wolfgang Muller, who is enchanted by Icelanders’ credulity about elves, to buy the elf-stone in Óskar's garden for €50,000, clearing Óskar's debts and enabling him to buy an expensive flat-screen television. However, Þrándur disappears and Lára falls into a coma; it later emerges that the vengeful elves have moved to a nearby elf-stone called Grásteinn, taking Lára's spirit with them. Meanwhile, the municipal authorities of Kópavogur are planning to sell Grásteinn in order to facilitate a road-widening project, despite mysterious technical problems and Lára's protestations. Recognising the reality of elves, Óskar and his children join protests at the building of the road; the leader of the protest makes a speech declaring Óskar lies down in front of a bulldozer whose brakes, implicitly through the intervention of the elves, fail, killing Óskar, whereupon Lára awakes from her coma. At Óskar's funeral, the priest declares The film ends with Óskar's ghost returning to his family to continue a happy family life there and to haunt his own ghost-house, while Ásis takes over the Ghost House business, which appears now to be a success. A sub-plot in the film is Ásdís's relationship with Sverrir Þorsteinsson, chairman of the atheist organisation Andtrú, whose views are portrayed as extremist.
