Barking mad: "Under the Tree"

Fences and neighbours, and all that. Under the Tree, a cool, cruel, somewhat narrow-minded comedy of social dysfunction - think Todd Solondz gone to Iceland - centres on a tattooed lad thrown out of the home he shares with his partner and their young daughter after the former catches him merrily revisiting an old sex tape he compiled with a previous girlfriend. This cad retreats to his parents' place for shelter, only to find they're in the midst of a tiff with the couple next door over a mighty chestnut tree that looms over both households. While a fiery custody battle rages over the daughter, so too this secondary frying pan hots up. Dog mess and insults are slung, gnomes toppled, tyres slashed; given that the opening credits reveal one of the warring parties as the proud possessor of a pellet gun, we're set to wondering just how low everybody's prepared to sink before somebody gets badly hurt.

This descent is charted with measured glee, but few real surprises, and not much in the way of distinguishing visual flair. Director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson has the usual Scandie eye for space and light - a few early shots carefully define just how the tree in question has come to drive a wedge between adjacent backyards - but applies his nous to heavily rigged situations from which no-one can really come away well. Occasional flourishes prompt thin snickers - we're offered recent cinema's least promising dad-and-daughter picnic, on the green banking outside an IKEA - but as comedy, it's held back by its maker's attitudes. Sigurðsson doesn't seem to like any of these characters, which only makes one wonder why we should look fondly upon them; they're chiefly patsies and pinatas, created to be beaten around as a prelude to a last-reel bloodbath. Perhaps, at this stage in 2018, the film could serve as a warning from one isolated land mass to another on what happens when rabid self-interest drives your citizens to turn on one another, but it could only be a passive-aggressive's idea of a fun night out.

Under the Tree is now playing in selected cinemas.