Critics Loved This Uncompromising, Unflinching Nordic Noir Murder Mystery for a Reason

Crime stories are pretty layered on their own, but there's a certain kind that doesn’t just ask who did it, but also makes viewers wonder if they really want to know. Jar City is one of those. The film starts out with your run-of-the-mill murder, there’s an old man found dead in his apartment in Reykjavik. But in a split second, many dirty secrets creep out of the works, which leads to a far more unsettling mega-secret. At the center of the narrative is Detective Erlendur (Ingvar E Sigurðsson) who’s been riding the system long enough to know that the past never goes away. But this murder case is something different altogether, and the more he investigates it, the more he realizes that the culprit is not just a killer — it’s a hoard of dirty secrets. The kind that leaves scars on an entire nation.