CineMuseFilms The family drama is an elastic genre label that is used when nothing else fits. It is an odd label for RAMS (2015), an endearing tale of an unconventional family consisting of two estranged brothers and their rams who live on adjacent farms in Iceland. They have not spoken for 40 years, are fiercely competitive with their prize-winning rams, and sometimes communicate via dog-carried notes or bullets through a window. They love their rams like kinfolk, pet them, kiss them and clearly are devoted shepherds. While the outside world buzzes with social and digital media innovation, life goes on for brothers Gummi and Kiddi as it has for generations amidst the harsh natural beauty of rural Iceland. Their fractious but largely peaceful co-existence is shattered when a highly contagious disease is discovered in the flock and local authorities decree that all must be destroyed.The story itself is not the point of RAMS. Rather it is an immersive insight into life on an Icelandic farm told through sensitive cinematography and understated storytelling. The vast space across rugged wind-swept landscapes have a brutal beauty and enter our viewing space with a chill you can feel. Long camera takes and even longer silences are expressions about the brothers lives in an environment untouched by modernity, with quirky Icelandic wit to brighten a muted colour palette of white and grey. The musical score erupts expressively to accentuate moments of humour, sadness and hope, often with just a few single dramatic piano chords. The scenes where beloved stock must be destroyed brought audible sniffles across my cinema. Through adversity, the brothers are forced to rely on each other and in the process renew something that should not have been lost so long ago.As an independent film RAMS is free to roam wherever its directorial and storytelling intentions choose and this results in a refreshingly different movie experience. Many will wonder why it has been so highly lauded because the pace is glacially slow, the actors are more like cameo characters, and some will find the concept of loving animals like family a bit weird. But others will see the primal relationship of shepherd to land and flock, be touched by the love that surfaces from under decades of sibling discord, and enjoy an old fashioned story about farm life in a hostile place. The ending is poignant, ambivalent, and a metaphor for the triumph of love and family.

diggus doggus I will not disagree with the substance of the reviews my fellow unpaid reviewers of IMDb have written; this is in fact, a touching film about stubborn men. I do however dispute that such a film has any place outside an art festival.Rams is the story of two icelandic brothers, Gummi and Kiddi (i kiddi you not), who have not spoke to each other for 40 years; the film makes it plenty clear that they resent each other (for whatever unknown reason), even going as far as one of the two shooting the other's windows out with a shotgun.After a yearly sheep pageant, with Kiddi's ram taking first prize, the jealous Gummi goes to inspect the ram, and he finds it has scrapie, a deadly disease similar to Mad Cow disease.Most of the rest of the film is the community's struggle with the impending loss of their sheep, which is understandable since sheep represent their only reason of living. During this struggle, there are attempts at reconciliation between the two brothers, which finally culminate in a brief ending where human emotion prevails.Right;I find this cookie cutter script to be far below my standard for Un Certain Regard prize material, and even though the film is reasonably well executed, there is not much to make it interesting enough to tie up one and a half hours of runtime. Sadly, it falls victim to the trailer test: cut off the film's ending, attach it to the trailer, and voilà' - you have most of the film's content in 3 minutes.I would not recommend Hrútar (Rams); the bland icelandic vistas are sure to impress the millionaires who preside of the Cannes festival, but are nothing special if you've been outside of the city in these last 30 years. The characters are simple, the plot is minimalistic, with nothing to fill in. If you are looking for a burst of human emotion, you'll have to sit through an entire film of 90 minutes for what you could have gotten from a spoilered review.Not surreal, not touching, not visionary, my final vote for Rams : 5/10

Colin Lomas (colinlomasox) In an age of digital marketing saturation, social media domination and notifications of the latest Disney blockbuster being sent to you while you're sat on the loo, it's always refreshing to have a film sneak up unannounced and give you that warm fuzzy hidden gem feeling. Resembling its Icelandic counterparts, Rams is like finding a Sigur Ros in a big bag of Coldplays.Rams follows two brothers who reside next door to each other in a remote sheep farming community in the Icelandic countryside. Having not spoken to each other for 40 years, Gummi (Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Júlíusson) are finally forced to deal with their strained relationship after a rare disease triggers the slaughter of their entire valleys flock. Each brother deals with the situation in his own way; Gummi having the functioning sibling role; calm and calculating with his understated intelligence and Kiddi with drink induced anger and violence.As you would expect from a film based on the hillsides of Iceland, the scenery is stunning but is never used to build the crew's cinematography portfolio. In fact, it only adds to the evident toughness of the people's lives there, surviving a challenging livelihood with the backdrop of such natural splendour. The relationship between the farmers and their animals and how it intrinsically represents, and is inherently tied to, the entire history of their family is at times both heart-warming and heart- breaking.What is most surprising about Rams is how it creeps up on you; how you find yourself sincerely caring for its characters towards the end of the film. You genuinely feel for the brother's relationship yet the script is so subtle in its depiction of the association between the two that the feeling comes as a real surprise when it finally hits. This is made even more remarkable considering how much of a slog the first thirty minutes are to get through.There are sweet little comedy moments too. The brothers use a sheep dog to deliver notes to each other and at one point Gummi delivers a drunken Kiddi to the local A&E in the bucket of a digger, but these moments are infrequent and never feel like forced slapstick. The humour is always believable and acts as a nice break from the melancholy of the primary story.Rams is a lovely surprise, a film that intentionally builds up slowly and is so understated in the development of its main characters that by the end of the film, you forget about almost everything else but the affection you have subconsciously developed for the two brothers. A sneaky little treasure of a movie whose ending will stay with you for a long time.

LeonardHaid Rams is an Icelandic saga of the highest order, not of Kings, but of the Icelandic sheep farmer. There are battles, but the opponents are nature, the struggles of human relationship, and the hardships of life. It is a saga of and for the working man, expressed and pared down like a working man's haiku, and it is breathtaking. Beyond the story, it is a visual feast. The Icelandic landscape - seen in both its green glory and its stark white glory - literally made me gasp at first. The sound of the howling, relentless winter wind touched a primal nerve in me. And as someone who has co-existed with animals for much of my life, and who has worked on farms for years, I was touched by the aphorism that you can love - truly love - your animals, and then kill them and eat them. Killing something you love is not an easy thing to do of course, but Rams is a blast of reality in that way. Sustenance and survival in the real world, people. It's not always pretty, and never packaged. Rams is harshness and it is beauty, contrasting, colliding, and intermingling, like an Icelandic landscape and an Icelandic sheep farmer's life. Ten out of ten stars.