When the Trees Come
2022 · 15m · Iceland
Directed by Berglind Thrastardottir
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: mythic, surreal, tender
In an Iceland where trees are swallowing the barren landscape, young Þröstur wakes to find blood in his teenage sister's bedsheets and wonders if she has become a werewolf — a fable of menstruation, magic, and a changing climate.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people will read this as sensitive coming-of-age allegory and call it a day—but Thrastardottir is actually doing something weirder, letting the werewolf mythology swallow the social realism whole, and that refusal to pick a lane is exactly why it works.
The film's mastery lies in its formal restraint: the way it lets Icelandic landscape grammar (emptiness, cold light, geological scale) do the symbolic work that overwrought metaphor would ruin, situating itself in a lineage of Nordic folk-fable cinema that takes its mythologies seriously.
The decision to shoot the reveal—or non-reveal—of the sister's transformation in near-total darkness, letting sound and the actor's breath do all the narrative heavy lifting, is the kind of constraint-into-strength choice that makes a 15-minute film feel inevitable.