AFI FILM FEST: A WINDOW ON SOME FAR SHORES : FRIDAY

“The Beast” (Iceland, 1986, 3:30 p.m.). Hilmar Oddson’s chamber drama has exactly the sort of dolorous absurdities and histrionic excess Ingmar Bergman’s critics often (inaccurately) accuse him of. Numbed, we watch Helgi and Lara, disturbed young writer and steadfast muse, isolated together on a barren fiord, suffering through Helgi’s Hour of the Walrus--as he broods, screams, and becomes pathologically obsessed with reindeer (which he blames somehow for his mother’s infidelity.) The film is as silly as it sounds, and Trostur Gennarsen (Helgi) acts less subtly than the reindeer. Yet Oddson is good at imagery, mood and tension; he may become a fine film maker, if he buries his angst in the fiords.