Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 93 min | 2017
Winner of four awards at its Locarno premiere, Hlynur Pálmason’s debut feature introduces the traits that would come to define his future work (notably, the 2022 western "Godland")—fertile interrogations of masculinity and its entailing savagery unfolding across bleached-out vistas rendered on film with expressionistic zeal. In a barren Danish outpost, two brothers toil in a limestone quarry. The pair—the charming elder sibling Johan (Simon Sears) and the gormless eccentric Emil (Elliott Crosset Hove)—are natural foils whose fraternal rivalry threatens to boil over when a noxious drop of moonshine prepared by the latter sends a co-worker to hospital. As Emil is further ostracized by the men around him, Winter Brothers descends into paranoia—with terrifying results.