This 2014 Czech feature veers unpredictably from broad comedy to dark chamber drama and back again; the tonal changes don’t always work, but the film keeps you on your toes. Two 40-ish louts return to the eponymous lakeside village of their childhood, which was a thriving community under communism but is now a ghost town. One of the men believes that his father and stepmother, who still live in Krásno, killed his mother four years earlier; he sets out to prove their guilt, but his investigation is sidelined over and over as he and his friend get drunk and make mischief like teenage delinquents. The noirish overtones and small-town caricatures might remind you of the Coen brothers’ Fargo, though the pessimistic humor is distinctly Czech. Ondrej Sokol, who plays one of the leads, directed his own script. In Czech with subtitles.
Krásno
1 hour 59 min • 2014
