The Oath (2016)

Original title: Eiðurinn

Finnur (Baltasar Kormákur) is a successful surgeon with what appears to be a happy and satisfied family life. However, ever since his daughter Anna (Hera Hilmar) has gotten together with her new boyfriend Óttar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), things have grown ever tenser. Óttar, you see, is involved in the drug trade, and the easy supply and closeness to that trade has gotten Anna hooked on drugs rather seriously, with a future as a proper junkie basically guaranteed if nothing happens quickly. Finnur is convinced that if he could only get Óttar out of Anna’s life, he could help her turn things around. But Óttar is not listening to reason anymore than Anna is, he’s not taking bribes, and when Finnur’s increasingly desperate attempts to somehow get rid of the younger man lead to the loss of a considerable amount of drugs, Óttar is starting to become violent and threatening himself. So what’s a surgeon to do? Kidnap the boyfriend, drug him and chain him to a radiator in a house out in the boons, apparently, putting the boy on ice until Finnur can decide if he can actually bring himself to commit murder.

Baltasar Kormákur is a strange director, with a filmography that seems harshly separated into crap big budget action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, impressive Human against Nature epics, and small, weird, off-beat black comedies with a deep noirish streak. The Oath is closest to that last strain in the director’s oeuvre, though it’s not really a comedy anymore but a psychological thriller whose few moments of comedy are so dark, one can’t help but look at oneself askance for laughing. For the most part, this is a thriller in the same vein as many a French genre entry from the 80s or 90s, less concerned with the actual mechanics of viscerally exciting an audience than with painting a detailed portrait of bourgeois people confronted with some kind of situation bringing them to emotional or intellectual extremes (which you can read as certainly running parallel to the director’s Human against Nature films, if you care to). In The Oath’s case, that extreme is more of a moral nature, the titular oath being the Hippocratic one and its insistence on doing no harm working counter to what the protagonist genuinely believes is necessary to protect the person he loves most in life.

To make Finnur’s dilemma work on more than a mere intellectual level, Kormákur portrays his relationship to Anna and his wife Solveig (Margrét Bjarnadóttir) not as you’d expect with the kind of treacly sweetness you get whenever dear Liam Neeson needs to save his little girl (bless him) but in a somewhat distanced and clinical manner that never feels as if it wants to press the audience into sharing his protagonists feelings but rather attempts to detail and explain them, so we can understand where Finnur is coming from even though we do not feel as he does. Pulling this off – and Kormákur does indeed pull it off – means the film has to be a master class on the telling detail, showing the inner lives of a family through a series of controlled and meaningful gestures rather than exposition.


Kormákur’s own performance in the lead role does add considerable dimension here, a degree of cold detachment actually convincing me more of the reality of Finnur’s character and situation than even the greatest scenery chewing could have. Finnur’s an interesting character, clearly priding himself on the detachment of the surgeon, trying to keep the kind of rational control over his surroundings that most of us learn early on is only achievable under the luckiest of circumstances, and only for a very short time. The film also realizes how basically self-centred Finnur’s approach to the situation is, even when we overlook how morally wrong his acts are. This thing is supposed to be all about the happiness and the future of his daughter, but in the end, he makes it all about himself, his inner struggle, his willingness to overthrow his beliefs. He doesn’t even realize the saddest thing about the relationship between Anna and Óttar (something the film understands very well): that these two are genuinely in love with each other; it’s just that it’s a love that most probably will kill Anna and ironically does kill Óttar in the end.