Jumping of the Nordic momentum raised by films like Let The Right One In, Antichrist and Cold Prey, Swedish actor-turned-director Fredrik Hiller delivers his debut feature in a rather messy fashion. Psalm 21 is one of those Christianity-themed, supernatural thrillers that I really wanted to enjoy. It’s just that too many things kept bothering me throughout.
The offset here is the fact that the Swedish church officially denounced the existence of a Christian hell back in the eighties. Hiller’s protagonist is a young priest who follows this ideal, but is destined to discover that hell can be many things. Things get going when the preacher, Henrik, gets a mysterious phone call that his estranged father – also a priest, although a more old-fashioned one to say the least – has died. Henrik journeys into the northern wilderness of hillbilly Sweden, only to wind up amongst ghostly apparitions of his dead mom (and her friend) and a gordian knot of a family belonging to his father’s parish.
Needless to say nobody and nothing is what it seems, including the film, which seems to wander aimlessly between ghost story and family-tension, never really combining the two and ultimately abandoning both for a totally misplaced attack on modern Christianity. Furthermore it seems as though Hiller – and maybe to a wider extent, his composer – has been hellbent on making a horror-flick regardless of the lack of horrific tension in his own script. The music is ridiculously bombastic throughout the film, almost never leaving room for any real intimacy and jumping at every chance to poke, jump, rumble or pull out any other ancient trick trying to scare us. It never works. There is but one kinda creepy scene in the film and even the climax of that one sorta rips of Annila’s similar, but vastly superior Sauna. Aside from that Psalm 21 is all about harmless cgi-enhanced ghosts of elderly women. That and an overacting lead performance by Jonas Malmsjö as Henrik – a protagonist who is literally outplayed by every actor he encounters except the elderly-women-ghosts.
The unfocused nature of the film, the uncontrolled nature of the music and badly measured performance of the central actor – put all this together and you’ve lost my attention pretty fast. I’m generally always intrigued by Christian horrors, but this one left me just kinda bored. So Hiller is right. Hell can be many things. It can be the Catholic Church’s tendency towards sodomy, as the film suggests. It can be modern day widespread religious misconceptions. And it can be sitting through films made by confused filmmakers with something on their mind but a weak understanding of how to pronounce it.
Screened at CPH:PIX 2010