Image via Rotten Tomatoes
Along the wintry border where Norway brushes against Sweden, the forest is thick, the sky is always partly cloudy unless it snows. In the new Norwegian drama Out Stealing Horses, the protagonist, Trond (Stellan Skarsgård), wears a face resembling the weather. He has chosen to live in this place, in a remote cabin close to events from his distant past.
Writer-director Hans Petter Molland sets his adaptation of Per Petterson’s novel in the weeks before Y2K. Trond lets us know that he won’t be celebrating the new millennium in the nearby village but will mark the passage of time alone—as he has done since his wife’s death three years earlier. But his lonely idyll is interrupted by the arrival of his nearest neighbor, Lars (Bjorn Floberg), which triggers Trond to further reflect on bye gone years.
Some of Out Stealing Horses is structured as Trond’s monologue, as if thinking (or talking?) to himself. Most of the film consists of memories within memories within memories, much like the way we often recollect. Many of the flashbacks return to 1948 when the adolescent Trond (Jon Ranes) observed the death of a neighbor child and experienced a guilty, almost Oedipal sexual awakening. Readers of Petterson’s novel might have an easier time identifying the relations between the various main characters. The story unspools in a rural culture not much given to talk, making difficult any emotional identification with the stoically unexpressive adults hovering over Trond’s childhood.
Out Stealing Horses’ visual strength is its close observation of nature—the rabbits and predatory owls, the deer that roam the forest. It’s also acutely aware of the hard work and unending toil of people living precariously off the land.
