New Film Transports Viewers to an Isolated Icelandic Township, Via a ‘Profound and Playful Masterwork’

‘Summerlight… and Then Comes the Night’ is a ragbag of shaggy dog stories that ambles along to sometimes dramatic, typically gentle, and ultimately touching comic purposes.

Via Juno Films
Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson in 'Summerlight... and Then Comes The Night.' Via Juno Films

After having watched Elfar Adalsteins’s “Summerlight… and Then Comes the Night,” I surfed over to Amazon to check the page count of the Jón Kalman Stefánsson book on which the film is based. With its many characters and generational intersections, I imagined it to be an opus on the scale of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” or Dickens’s “Bleak House.” Instead, the novel comes in at 246 pages. This doesn’t seem plausible, given the encompassing nature of Mr. Adalsteins’s picture.

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