Noi is an intelligent 17-year old, living today's Icelandic rural life. Noi is a very white lad, looking much like a lead singer in some band called "Midnight Oil". Completing the white-death symbolism which permeates this film, Noi is an albino surrounded by icy, white, snowy landscapes.
Noi can solve the Rubric Cube in a matter of a couple of minutes and defeat a skilled opponent at "Mastermind" within seconds. However, most people who know Noi don't appreciate his innate intelligence nor his very well hidden libido. That's because they've pretty much accepted their tamped-down rural lives. Most people around Noi are dead-like, passionless and joyless, but don't know it. Noi knows. He knows a lot of things; but he's not ready to let anyone else in on his secrets. Besides, it's hard communicating with the living-dead. He's keeping his libidinous urges to himself, hiding away, waiting for the right moment.
Living in a semi-morgue can be cold and cold you are, watching "Noi The Albino". Noi's grandmother moves with a sense of deliberate Spockian purpose, expressionless and ever so slowly. His teacher teaches with a dispassion, resembling a 12th Century Gregorian chant, droned within a drafty, stone church. And his father is like a zombified Jim Backus, resigned to remembering the sparks of lives past, with his own karaoke recordings of Elvis songs populating his taxi's glovebox--graveyards of a ghetto-life gone by.
Noi is 'California dreaming',like kids his age did back in the 60s. He wants out of this winter of constant discontent, this daily life of quiet, hallroom tick-tocks, passing time over things, like jigsaw puzzles, waiting, waiting for snowy, stone cold death. Noi dreams escape to the warmth of an Hawaiian life. In the meantime, he'll drop out--rebel style, without a cause, so to speak--except for himself. Noi's alone, an isolated individual rebel or so he thinks, until he meets the new girl in town, Iris. Iris is from the city. Noi tests her with a dare or two and stirs an ember of adventure. You can see it in her face. They stimulate each other's imagination within the snowy, white within the deathly, cold Icelandic winter. The cold drives them to find each other most appropriately, in the local museum, a house of dead things. But,daydreaming is as far as Iris will go with Noi and when Noi steals a car urging Iris to become his partner in crime, to make the small town prison break of their lives, Iris remains behind with cold feet and like the others surrounding Noi, she stares her farewell with cold, cold eyes of resignation. Noi's emotional, romantic rebellion ends in its usual impotent rage.
Noi's job as a gravedigger and his special hideout, a hole below the floors of his grandma's house, all point to one direction for this lad. As he is told by the town tea leaf reader, "You will be surrounded by death."
Noi can solve the Rubric Cube in a matter of a couple of minutes and defeat a skilled opponent at "Mastermind" within seconds. However, most people who know Noi don't appreciate his innate intelligence nor his very well hidden libido. That's because they've pretty much accepted their tamped-down rural lives. Most people around Noi are dead-like, passionless and joyless, but don't know it. Noi knows. He knows a lot of things; but he's not ready to let anyone else in on his secrets. Besides, it's hard communicating with the living-dead. He's keeping his libidinous urges to himself, hiding away, waiting for the right moment.
Living in a semi-morgue can be cold and cold you are, watching "Noi The Albino". Noi's grandmother moves with a sense of deliberate Spockian purpose, expressionless and ever so slowly. His teacher teaches with a dispassion, resembling a 12th Century Gregorian chant, droned within a drafty, stone church. And his father is like a zombified Jim Backus, resigned to remembering the sparks of lives past, with his own karaoke recordings of Elvis songs populating his taxi's glovebox--graveyards of a ghetto-life gone by.
Noi is 'California dreaming',like kids his age did back in the 60s. He wants out of this winter of constant discontent, this daily life of quiet, hallroom tick-tocks, passing time over things, like jigsaw puzzles, waiting, waiting for snowy, stone cold death. Noi dreams escape to the warmth of an Hawaiian life. In the meantime, he'll drop out--rebel style, without a cause, so to speak--except for himself. Noi's alone, an isolated individual rebel or so he thinks, until he meets the new girl in town, Iris. Iris is from the city. Noi tests her with a dare or two and stirs an ember of adventure. You can see it in her face. They stimulate each other's imagination within the snowy, white within the deathly, cold Icelandic winter. The cold drives them to find each other most appropriately, in the local museum, a house of dead things. But,daydreaming is as far as Iris will go with Noi and when Noi steals a car urging Iris to become his partner in crime, to make the small town prison break of their lives, Iris remains behind with cold feet and like the others surrounding Noi, she stares her farewell with cold, cold eyes of resignation. Noi's emotional, romantic rebellion ends in its usual impotent rage.
Noi's job as a gravedigger and his special hideout, a hole below the floors of his grandma's house, all point to one direction for this lad. As he is told by the town tea leaf reader, "You will be surrounded by death."