Beautiful Beings explores the violent tenderness of teenage boys growing up in the outskirts of Reykjavík. Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson (Heartstone) delivers a film that’s both raw and poetic, immersed in physical aggression and emotional longing.

Addi, raised by a clairvoyant mother, forms an unlikely bond with Balli, a bullied and lonely boy. What begins as a gesture of solidarity becomes an initiation into masculinity, vulnerability, and silent trauma. The group of friends navigates a world where fights, scars and silence are the language of survival.

Guðmundsson doesn’t offer moral lessons but rather an atmosphere: of pain, touch, and glimmers of empathy. The film flirts with the supernatural, not as fantasy, but as a way to hint at inner lives too repressed to be spoken.

Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen captures the harshness of Icelandic suburbs with dreamy overtones, evoking a contrast between external brutality and internal softness. The performances —especially Birgir Dagur Bjarkason as Balli— are heartbreakingly restrained, embodying boys who are all wounds, covered in armor.

There’s a powerful physicality in the film: fists hitting, bodies collapsing, eyes avoiding. And yet, amid the harshness, Beautiful Beings insists on small gestures of care: a shared cigarette, a bath, a look.

This is a coming-of-age story where violence doesn’t just happen — it shapes, deforms, protects. And still, Guðmundsson leaves space for beauty to seep through the cracks.