This movie is based on a true story. We are on the island of Bastoy off the Norwegian coast, 1915. The island is home to a correctional facility for maladjusted teenaged and pre-teen boys. The boys have committed various minor offences, not quite serious enough to be put to prison, so they are sent to this facility to learn discipline; to be taught to read, to behave and to become good Christians. To this end, naturally, they are given numbers instead of names, have to wear uniforms, and are put to work in the field, the forest (it’s a fairly large island), the kitchen, and doing the laundry (not to mention the latrine). Depending on how well they do, they can earn their way off the island in a few years, or stay for however long. Escaping the island has been tried, but never successfully.
The governor in charge – I don’t think we ever hear his name, but he is played by Stellan Skarsgård to his usual high standard – is a stern and, for the time, fairly decent person who believes in what he is doing, but naturally the place in general is pretty much hell on earth for the young boys who have to endure a litany of strict and humiliating rules; any transgression is severely punished. The governor presides over a small group of “housefathers”; the adult overseers who put the boys to work in their daily grind.
We follow two boys in particular, C19 and C1, with a smaller focus on a third, C5. C1 is the most well-behaved boy, working as a sort of prefect, and due to be sent home soon. He befriends C19, a new arrival, who is rumored to have killed a man. C19 arrives with C5, and they have to try to fit into the existing system. For different reasons, neither of them succeed, and their problems eventually lead to a facility-wide riot.
It’s a realistic and well-acted movie which engages the viewer all the way through, even if the particularly beastly bit of abuse that you know is coming is rather predictable. But the movie works splendidly on several levels; on the one hand we have a touching portrayal of a silent camaraderie between all the boys which comes to a head towards the end because they’ve all just had enough of the awful conditions on the island, and on the other hand the movie is careful to assign all the blame to the adults and the social thinking of the time, rather than to the kids, however maladjusted they are. Human beings are shaped by their social circumstances, and not by any innate failings.
This movie has been compared to Lord of the Flies, but such a comparison doesn’t quite hold up, since this is not so about what the boys do among themselves, but about how they respond to the abusive behavior of adult society.
It’s good to see how alive and well Norwegian cinema seems to be these days; besides the odd Lars Von Trier outing, we don’t seem to have nearly as much competent movie-making going on in my native Denmark.
King of Devil’s Island is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK on October 29. The screener reviewed here is the DVD version, which has a clean, crisp image, but no extras beyond scene selections and a trailer.
Director: Marius Holst
Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Benjamin Helstad, Trond Nilssen, Kristoffer Joner, Magnus Langlete and others.
Runtime: 112 min.
Country: Norway
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DVD Rating:
