The Icelandic version was better – and had better knits: Rams reviewed

Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that better film. It’s the Icelandic one, of the same name, released in 2015, on which this Australian version is based. That was played as a spare, stark, bitterly dark comedy set amid ice and blizzards and featuring men with unkempt beards, whereas this is sunnier and more kempt and therefore significantly blander. You may even, at various points, feel as though you’ve been trapped in an overlong episode of All Creatures Great and Small (nothing against All Creatures Great and Small, but two hours of it?).

The film stars the always kempt, perpetually handsome Sam Neill whose performance here involves considerable amounts of staring into the middle distance in that thoughtful, squinty-eyed way — Clint Eastwood-style. He is Colin and he has a brother, Les (Michael Caton). The action has been uprooted to remote Western Australia where the pair share the family land, live in houses less than 100 metres apart, and haven’t talked for 40 years.