Blond thirty-something year old Ingrid has lost her sight abruptly to an undiagnosed condition and now, depressed and unsettled, she just whiles away in the stark white high-rise apartment in Oslo that she shares with Morton her architect husband.
★★
She refuses to ever venture outside at all and actually suspects that Morton actually sneaks back in the middle of the day and just spies on her silently. In the deliberate and slow pace at the start of this story we see Ingrid sitting with her laptop on the window sill peering out into the void and we are not sure what she is up to as we hear her thoughts in the voice-over.
Turns out that she is actually writing a piece of fiction that she vividly imagines as she sits there in her darkness. At the centre of her story is Elin a single mother who has recently moved to the city from Sweden and lives in an apartment building opposite the one that Einar lives in and spies on her all the time when he is not engrossed watching pornography on his computer. And then Ingrid writes her husband into the piece, and that’s when the movie goes in a totally different direction mixing imagination with reality.
Saying it gets complicated is a gross understatement especially when the pace steps up with Ingrid’s imagination running wild and Elin, also blond and not physically dissimilar, starts dating Morton and goes blind too. For once I had no idea what to make of this all when I viewed it at Sundance last year, but people around me were quick to compare it to a Charlie Kaufman movie (Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Adapation + Being John Malkovitch) which I guess makes a lot of sense.
The reason that it was on my ‘watchlist’ in the first place is its because it’s the directing debut of writer Eskil Vogt who was responsible for one of my favourite movies of 2013 Oslo, August 31st.
