Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Sigur Rós: Inni Blu-ray Movie Review

Bringing the art back to the concert film.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 19, 2011

Just ask any music journalist—trying to describe the sound of Icelandic post-rock quartet Sigur Rós is a futile exercise in hyperbole, with flailing allusions to the band’s icy, volcanic homeland. Their early albums swell and pulse outward like broadcasts from the dark side of some frozen, storm- enshrouded planet. Lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto has the high-pitched pierce of a glass plate vibrated by a sine wave, his signature guitar sound —the reverb-heavy scraping of a cello bow across the strings—like the groaning shear of a thawing glacial plane. At their most cosmic, they make music that simultaneously suggests creation ex nihilo and the collapse of the universe at the very end of time—a score for the dying dreams of some forgotten Old Norse deity.

Cliché? Sure. Overblown? Absolutely. But this is what inevitably comes to mind when you turn off the lights, put on some serious, audiophile-grade headphones—iPod earbuds don’t cut it here—and let yourself be enveloped by Sigur Rós. Over the course of five full-length albums, the band has progressively gotten more melodic and concise—a shift from brooding to triumphant—but what remains constant is a sense of transcendence, of outright majesty. There’s no one like them. It’s appropriate, then, that their latest concert film, Inni, is far from typical. Where most concert movies now are presented in pristine high definition, with sweeping crane shots and pulled back views of the complete stage—an aesthetic that has no mystery or artfulness whatsoever—Inni is grainy, dark, and warped, with tight close-ups of the band members seemingly playing in a black void. It’s lo-fi, handmade, hypnotic—think the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense as shot by Guy Maddin or David Lynch.

The film is the brainchild of French-Canadian director and interactive web artist Vincent Morriset, most recently known for his excellent Arcade Fire documentary, Mirror Noir. For Inni, filmed in 2008 at London’s Alexandra Palace, Morriset took a satisfyingly unconventional approach. The process started with shooting the concert on HD video and small, hidden surveillance cameras, but once this digital footage was edited together, it was displayed on a large monitor and re-photographed with a 16mm film camera. The film was then projected onto a screen and shot yet again on HD video while Morriset and experimental filmmaker Karl Lemieux physically manipulated the light coming out of the projector, using their fingers to create flickers and warping the picture through salad bowls and other glass objects.

The result is a sometimes Stan Brakhage-ish image that looks like a long-lost silent film, dim and blurry, ghostly and surreal. It captures the band in the abstract as near-mythological beings, conduits through which the music is channeled, piped in from some supernatural source. (Spiritual is a good word for the pagan-leaning Sigur Rós. The lyrics to many of their songs are in a made-up language called Vonlenska—or, Hopelandic—a kind of glossolalia that might best be described as singing in tongues.) Morriset is clearly playing to fans’ perception of the band as remote indie-rock divinity, but every few songs he flips this and shows us vintage footage of their early days, where they look like four average Nordic guys in turtlenecks, playing shows at dive clubs, goofing off, and responding with shy silence when an NPR interviewer asks them if they started off “more regular-sounding.”

At a trim one hour and fifteen minutes, Inni only has room for nine of Sigur Rós’ characteristically long, slow-morphing songs, with the tracklist drawn from each of their albums since 1999’s breakthrough Ágætis byrjun. It’s a strong set, although it could probably stand to be a bit more varied. (The two-disc, 15-track live album that accompanies the film is a better representation of the scope of their sound.) Opener “Ny batterí” starts with a squall of bow-on-guitar feedback and builds to a sudden overdriven assault when drummer Orri Páll Dyrason unleashes a cymbal-and-bass-drum fury. “Svefn-g-englar,” one of the band’s most iconic tracks, is haunted by a repetitive submarine sonar-like ping that cuts through the surrounding wash of sound, and “Fljótavík” is pure piano catharsis. Most of the songs here skew towards the grand, emotionally cataclysmic epic-ness that the band is known for, but there are moments of flighty joy, like the title track, “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur,” a tinkling piece of upbeat pop that features Jónsi and keyboardist Kjarri Sveinsson in duet. With the exception of the unreleased closing number—the graceful “Lúppulagið”—all of these songs will be familiar to fans, but Inni places them in a new context, an evocative black- and-white fever-dream that does justice to Sigur Rós’ strange, otherworldly sound.

Track List

• "Ný batterí"
• "Svefn-g-englar"
• "Fljótavík"
• "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur"
• "Sæglópur"
• "Festival"
• "E-Bow"
• "Popplagið"
• "Lúppulagið"

Sigur Rós: Inni Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Obviously, due to the way the film was shot and manually post-processed, Inni can't be evaluated like your run-of-the-mill release. In fact, the image that director Vincent Morriset has cooked up is practically antithetical to what most people expect from Blu-ray—namely, a crystal clear, vibrantly colored picture. That's just not what Inni is all about. Instead, it has a grungy, organic-meets-HD quality that splits the difference between film and digital. It's intentionally soft and purposefully murky, with crushing black levels and contrast that's sometimes pushed and elsewhere flattened. It even utilizes occasional standard definition archival footage. But there no question whatsoever that this 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is the best way to watch the film outside of a theater. (Speaking of, keep your eyes out for showings. The film is playing dates in select cities across the country.) Inni looks fantastic—it has the haunting, flickering quality of a thrice-duped German Expressionist film—and I'm certain that it looks exactly as intended here. You could probably nitpick and find traces of compression or other minor issues—I didn't spot any worth noting—but I'm giving the disc a 4.5/5 for being a gorgeous, wholly unique Blu-ray experience.

Sigur Rós: Inni Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sigur Rós, live, mixed in 5.1 and presented via a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track? Yes, please, and thank you. Inni's stellar visuals are backed up by an extremely powerful, immersive reproduction of the band's nine-song set. If you're familiar with Sigur Rós, you know that dynamic doesn't even begin to describe the depth of their music, which combines deep bass, aching-glacier guitar swells, and crashing drums with crystalline high-end sounds like xylophones and tinkling electronics. Not to mention Jónsi's world-shattering falsetto. Live, their sound is cavernously huge, drenched in watery reverb. This mix gets it perfect. Period. All 5.1 channels are utilized throughout, filling the room with rich, clear, forceful audio. You'll want turn your receiver up loud, sit back, and soak it all in.

Sigur Rós: Inni Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc includes four bonus tracks, which are presented in black and white 16mm but don't appear to have been manually manipulated like the rest of the footage. In high definition.

• All Alright (5:58)
• Glosoli (6:48)
• Hafsol (8:26)
• Við spilum endalaust (3:15)

Also included in this release is the 2-CD Inni live album, which includes six songs not featured in the film:

Disc One

• Svefn-g-englar
• Glósóli
• Ný batterí
• Fljótavík
• Við spilum endalaust
• Hoppípolla
• Með blóðnasir
• Inní mér syngur vitleysingur
• E-Bow

Disc Two

• Sæglópur
• Festival
• Hafsól
• All Alright
• Popplagið
• Lúppulagið

Sigur Rós: Inni Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Sigur Rós recently announced a new album and tour for 2012, but when Inni was recorded, their fate as a band was in question, and director Vincent Morriset was under the assumption that he was recording what might be their last concerts. That sense of urgent finality comes through not just in the music, but also in Morriset's stark, hand-tweaked black and white visuals. Inni is what all concert films should aspire to be—not just a documentary, but a summation of the band's entire aesthetic—and this Blu-ray is easily the best way to watch it at home. The release also includes the 2-disc, 15-track live album, which includes several songs not heard in the film. Highly recommended!