Devil's Island
Devil's Island
| 12 March 1999 (USA)
Devil's Island Trailers

Devil's Island is a bitter sweet tale of Iceland in the fifties. Life is rough in Reykjavik's post-war slum of Camp Thule, where the abandoned US military barracks have been turned into makeshift homes. Struggling wives and their hard-working husbands try to make ends meet. The younger generation dreams of dollars, Rock'n'Roll and the American way of life. To celebrate or to drown their misery - they're never short of a good reason to booze. Devil's Island vividly depicts the everyday life of a wacky family, their neighbours and friends and shows how some of their dreams come true and others don't.

Reviews
Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
esighs I have to say that I was never a big fan of Icelandic movies.. I always thought the acting was kinda fake and I was never really that much into them. But one day I got the movie Djöflaeyjan and I was kinda reluctant to watch it but since I didn't have anything better to do I put it in and in a few moments I was caught in it... The part where Danni dies and you see the grandfathers eyes is the saddest and the best scene for me that involves death in a movie. You don't always have to see people falling down with grief and screaming.. his empty sad stare where you see his eyes full of tears is the best acting I have seen in a long time. I watched it again yesterday and it still is as good as the day I saw it first. I hope you give it a chance it really is worth it.
þorsteinn þráinsson This movie is really good. At least it's better than the book although many people would disagree with me there. To enjoy this film more than some have been doing you'll have to know what situation the people are in. The movie is based on the Icelandic lives at that time. I think it's a great movie but not the best Icelandic movie i've seen.If I would see some film that is identical to this one from another country with another culture I would not enjoy it as much. For example if there were a movie about someone in Britain and I would not know the situation the people would be in I wouldn't understand the story in the film.I recommend to everybody who can read the book to read it before or after you see this film. In the book you can see the storyline much better and you'll know why this is a really good movie.
El_Sordo I saw this movie in a university class. First, I felt it was somewhat loose in storyline and editing, and it took me a while to get me into the story. but then I got accustomed with the characters and was fine after all.The story is about a family that lives in some come-down US-barrack-shelters in the early 1950ies. It covers a couple of years of time. It's built up like a classic Icelandic saga - about a family in Iceland, with one character, Baddi that is, in the middle, and the problems Baddi causes. But that might also make the story a bit boring.Characters are odd and funny. Cinematography is excellent. If you like Scandinavian cinema and and story lines you can't predict, this is a movie you should watch.
Buckywunder I go out of my way to view foreign/independent film (I know, we're a vanishing breed) and rented this video at a neighborhood store that has a pretty good foreign selection mostly on the power of having seen COLD FEVER, which I enjoyed.While I appreciate "dark comedies" as much as the next person -- and am a huge fan of Aki Kurasmaki (so I have some familiarity of Scandinavian film sensibility) -- it was a mistake to have placed so much of the film's success around a character as thoroughly unlikable as Baddi. While he dominates the screen with charmless, witless and appalling behavior that knows no bounds (premised on his contact with "America"), most of the other characters are used as props and are nobly antithetical, i.e., they have a conscience. But for the most part, as a whole they cannot counterbalance the effect that the Baddi character has on the film. That is a shame because there appeared to be some good potential character driven aspects to the story that were wasted.