14-year-old Balli feels out of place. An incident with his aggressive stepfather, who thought the gun was unloaded, left the teen with one glass eye. He lives with his drug addicted mother in a run-down house and endures his classmates’ bullying. After meeting three boys his age, Addi, Konni and Siggi, a friendship slowly forms. Balli comes to realise that others can react to him with more than just a need to assert their superiority, but that he can also stir people’s selfless side. He starts to understand that someone who is tired of taking abuse can often become a bully himself.

Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson anchors his coming-of-age story in the space between adolescent cruelty, the supernatural, and the frailty of trust. With a fiery poeticism and a sharp sense of magic the film explores the spirals and patterns of young male violence. Guðmundsson observed dysfunctional families, addiction, and toxic masculinity in his adolescence in the 1990s, where you can find hope in losing yourself in dream readings, and in the consolations of mysticism.