'Mýrin' aka 'Jar City' (2006) - Baltasar Kormákur.

To say that gifted director Baltasar Kormákur's obsidian drenched thriller is a somewhat bleak affair is like saying Scott Walker had a passable baritone, since this pitilessly glacial Icelandic crime drama enjoys an unusually distressing, heart-wrenching premise, and when the sartorially rumpled, delightfully dour, boiled sheep's head consuming copper Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) stolidly begins to unearth the especially grisly details surrounding the murder of the faintly sleazy middle-aged trucker Holberg (Þorsteinn Gunnarsson) his seemingly arbitrary slaying merely the prosaic prelude to a grimly compelling mystery wherein the craggy-looking, strikingly blue-eyed sleuth Erlendur very soon descends into an emotional maelstrom of long-buried family secrets, egregious acts of crass police corruption, the eternally soul-withering torment born of a child's tragic premature death, and along with Erlendur's very own personal turmoil, there is a stifling sense of debilitating spiritual dislocation, profound human grief and a profound existential horror that darkly enshrouds 'Mýrin' like the oppressive miasma unleashed of a clumsily violated grave.

While enigmatic actor Ingvar E. Sigurdsson makes for an appealingly downtrodden protagonist, and his younger, joke-absorbent colleague Oli (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) proves an equally engaging foil for Erlendur's barbed asides, the wintry, brine-lashed desolation of these almost primordial-looking Icelandic vistas imbuing Baltasar Kormákur's densely-plotted, morbidly engrossing, frequently unsettling crime drama with an uncommonly stark, marrow-frosting pathos and emotionally fractured vulnerability the more forensically obsessed thrillers, their luridly pornographic relish of violent crime a prosaic substitute for good writing, mordant wit and emotional verisimilitude. Within today's glut of increasingly formulaic Nordic Noir the idiosyncratic 'Jar City', like its unique location stands wholly alone.