Nordic bad boy auteur Baltasar Kormákur is back with this emotionally charged, briskly paced and tragically comic rendition of Anton Chekhov’s “Ivanov” set on a desolate island off Iceland’s northern coast.

Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik, The Sea) fearlessly and playfully plumbs the human psyche with this mostly lighthearted take on Chekhov’s tragic tale of a man caught in the crosshairs of a Kierkegaardian dilemma. The story opens comically with the impending nuptials of Jon (a professor of literature) and his one-time student, Thora – a match that everyone but Jon and Thora opposes. She’s half his age, he’s recently widowed and her mother thinks he’s a lout. Kormákur then takes us back to Jon’s earlier life, when he was married to Anna, a severely manic-depressive artist who begs him to move to the remote northern island of Flatey in hopes of a recovery; instead he finds Thora, precipitating Anna’s further descent. As dour as all that sounds, Kormákur puckishly shuttles the story back and forth in time and fills out his cast with a Local Hero-like assemblage of likeable wackos including the island’s irascible Calvinist minister, a would-be golf course designer and Jon’s bear-sized, party-animal friend, Börkur. Set in the endless daylight of the Nordic summer, the film is stunningly photographed and the barren landscape acts as a dreamy backdrop for this humorous and at times boisterous examination of one man’s moral ambiguity. (Icelandic with English subtitles) -- Eric Moore