There was a time (yesterday actually) when we took a drive all the way up to Aldeburgh on a pretty grey Easter Saturday afternoon to sit in a local, very old fashioned cinema to see a film about two middle aged, feuding sheep farmers in a bleak and remote part of Iceland that had little dialogue and was subtitled anyway.
And yet Rams turned out to be a sometimes funny and melancholic tale about two brothers who haven’t spoken to each other for forty years, rear sheep on farms next to each other and communicate by sending the occasional message to each other via a scene stealing sheepdog (when they aren’t content to simply grunt at each other).
When their livelihoods (and those of their local community), are threatened by an outbreak of scrapie, they grudgingly begin to communicate again, although their responses to the problem are very different. There was humour in their relationship and one or two laugh out loud scenes, but in essence I think this slow moving tale (slow but never dull) was about the preservation of a particular way of living and whether or not the brothers can find a common purpose when their ancestral sheep stock and whole way of life are threatened. I won’t give away the ending in case by chance you get to see it, but will say that its somewhat haunting conclusion provides a kind of reconciliation that stays with you far more than the typical Hollywood happy ever after could ever do.