Director – Magnus Martens – 2023 – Norway – Cert. 15 – 100m
*
An American family immigrates to Norway where a relative has died and left them a farmhouse with a barn… and there’s something in the barn – badly misjudged horror comedy is out in UK cinemas and on digital download from Friday, December 1st
I have watched this film so that you don’t have to.
Incidentally, it has some of the best film stills I’ve ever seen. They are truly great. Don’t let that fool you: it’s a rotten movie.
One year after the unpleasant death of their Norwegian relative, the Californian nuclear family of dad, step-mum, son and daughter arrive at his farmhouse and barn in Norway which they’ve inherited. The unpleasant death is intriguing and workable if unoriginal horror fare; there is indeed something in the barn, and it’s not happy. So not happy, that it kills the relative.
But once the Californian family appear, the film undergoes a huge shift of tone from straight horror to pretty embarrassing comedy. Or, more accurately, alleged comedy because the laughs (or laugh – I think I may have laughed once) are (is) few and far between. Dad Bill (Martin Starr) is a happy-go-lucky, irritating, nerdy caricature; his new wife – and therefore step-mum to his kids – Carol (Amrita Acharia) is an equally annoying, former self-help guru. Teenage daughter Nora (Zoe Winther-Hansen) misses her friends and the sea and sand.
Curiously, young teenage son Lucas (Townes Bunner) feels less caricatured and more like a reasonably normal, well-adjusted kid. It’s almost as if Lucas and the rest of his family are appearing in two very different films.
With Christmas fast approaching, a trip to the local village reveals differences between the outgoing Californians and the more reserved Norwegian locals. Lucas however wanders off, gets talking to and hits it off with friendly, local elf museum owner Tor Åge (Calle Hellevang-Larsen, seeming to appear in the same movie as Lucas, as opposed to the one with Lucas’ irritating family), learning all manner of interesting facts and folklore about Norwegian elves.
For instance, there are barn elves which live in (yes, you guessed it) barns which, if treated well, will treat the barn owner well but, if treated badly, will wreak all manner of havoc and mayhem upon them. These elves are very traditional – they hate light and noise and change. On Christmas Eve, they like nothing more than a hot bowl of porridge with a knob of butter in the centre – provide that, and all will be well.
Tor may not believe elves really exist, but events in the barn convince Lucas otherwise, and he sets about befriending the premises’ barn elf.
Alas, mum and dad have an entirely different agenda: get to know the locals, so they festoon the barn with Christmas lights and give out fliers for a big Christmas party, an event which proves a great success in terms of breaking down Norwegian reserve, and the outsiders bonding with them, all thanks to copious amounts of alcohol. Unfortunately, the noise and light are not taken well by the barn elf, who later goes into the house and breaks items of kitchen crockery. As the situation escalates, the family find themselves at war with a bunch of unfriendly elves…
From the moment of the American family’s Norwegian arrival, when they annoy a moose by going too close to its offspring, they keep running into their friendly if no-nonsense local policewoman (Henriette Steenstrup) who continually offers rational if increasingly implausible explanations for the evidence of elf mayhem.
The big problem this film has is that, main character Lucas aside, the family are so unlikeable and stupid that it’s hard to feel any sympathy for them. The other three actors play these parts in broad comic strokes, which really doesn’t work. Whether this is down to caricatures of the Americans in the script by Norwegian writer Aleksander Kirkwood Brown, or poor direction, or misjudged performances by the three cast members – or a mixture of all three factors – it’s impossible to say, but something has gone badly wrong here. And not, alas, in the way that you would hope from a horror film.
That’s a shame, because Lucas, the elves and the locals could easily have made for a serviceable scarefest, but the playing for laughs of the father, stepmother and daughter completely undermine it, rendering the film near unwatchable. (The below teaser trailer wisely if deceitfully focuses on the former element, which make the film look OK, and leaves the latter element out.) If Finnish entry Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Jalmari Helander, 2010) proves the Scandinavians capable of delivering terrific, seasonal, fantasy horror fare, the current Norwegian disaster proves them equally capable of turning out a turkey.
There’s Something In The Barn is out in cinemas in the UK and on digital download from Friday, December 1st.
Trailer: