Hans Petter Moland’s Aberdeen is a strangely lyrical film, an evocative tale of addiction and familial disconnect that takes a young coke-fiend attorney, Kaisa (Lena Headey), and her estranged alcoholic father, Thomas (Stellan Skarsgård), on a car trip from Norway to England. Kaisa’s mother Helen (Charlotte Rampling) asks that she bring Thomas to Aberdeen. She claims that he’s ready for rehab when, in actuality, she’s dying of cancer and hopes to bring the daughter and father together before her death. Moland evokes human distance via the film’s ravishing, lonesome Nordic vistas and England’s hazy countrysides. Kaisa and Thomas grow close despite the pent-up emotional queasiness, projectile vomiting and the possibility that they may not be genetically related. Though Helen remains a cipher throughout, a truck driver (Ian Hart) arrives just in time to enrich her story—allowing for the possibility of romantic love. Wickedly amusing, never cloying and genuinely earnest, Aberdeen is almost other-worldly, a divine reminder that one must work for love.
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