A 2022 coming-of-age drama from Iceland, Beautiful Beings watches friendship and violence tangle together inside a group of teenage boys with nobody steady enough at home to pull them apart.
What is Beautiful Beings about?
Raised by a mother who believes she has psychic gifts, a teenage boy folds a bullied classmate into his circle of restless, sometimes destructive friends. The group drifts toward increasingly dangerous situations as adolescence pushes them past the edge of what any of them can control. Inside that drift, something shifts in the boy himself: an inner instinct he can't quite name starts pulling him toward a different way of handling conflict, one shaped as much by his mother's strange intuition as by the new friend he's brought into the fold. The film treats teenage cruelty and teenage tenderness as two sides of the same restlessness, following the boys without softening either one.
About the cast
The young ensemble is led by Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, alongside Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson, and Sunna Líf Arnarsdóttir, with Kamilla Guðrún Lowen, Kristín Ísold Jóhannesdóttir, and Ísgerður Elfa Gunnarsdóttir also featured. Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson directs.
Context & significance
Beautiful Beings is an international co-production spanning the Czech Republic, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and it holds a strong critical reception among festival-circuit dramas of its year. Its portrait of teenage masculinity, threaded through with an almost mystical sensitivity, sets it apart from more conventional bullying narratives, and the largely young, non-professional-feeling cast gives the friendships on screen a lived-in, unguarded quality that carries the film's 123-minute runtime.
Watching Beautiful Beings on Ktime
Beautiful Beings streams on K-Time with a free account login, and the page itself is open to read without signing in. The film includes both Persian dub and Persian subtitle options, making it accessible for Farsi-speaking viewers who want the dialogue rendered in their own language, alongside the original Icelandic-language cut for those who prefer it. K-Time's Farsi interface is built with exactly this kind of international drama in mind.