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Björk is the reason to see Nietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree (1990), though if you’re inclined to watch it I probably don’t have to tell you that. In Keene’s feminist rejiggering of the same-named Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Björk, 21 when the film was shot and not yet going by just her forename in public, plays Margit, a girl coded as a lot younger than 21 who, when the film opens, is starting life anew with her older sister, Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir). The occasion is not a happy one: their mother has just been stoned and burned to death in the since-destroyed community they once called home for supposedly practicing witchcraft. 

We’ll learn quickly that those lethal accusations probably weren’t wrong. Margit often has abstract visions of the future that usually turn out to be true. As she and her sibling are traveling by foot toward nowhere in particular in rural, Medieval Iceland, Katla declares that she’s going to literally enchant a man to love and take care of her. Her assertions pan out in no time. The object of her affection is a towheaded farmer named Jóhann (Valdimar Örn Flygenring) who’s grieving, alongside his mini-me son Jonas (Geirlaug Sunna Þormar), the recent death of his wife. 

Jóhann doesn’t — or, if Katla’s magical ability is as strong as it seems, cannot — question, at least for a while, how this woman and her younger sister managed to walk into his life one day and he felt moved to take them in without a second thought. Though he bonds quickly with Margit with games outdoors and shadow-puppet shows before bed, Jonas can immediately tell that something is amiss. His anguished proclamations that his mother cannot be replaced are not merely couched in grief. 

Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir and Björk in The Juniper Tree.

The Juniper Tree is refreshingly unfaithful to its source material, fiddling with the storyline so that the women characters, though not visions of moral perfection, are not as villainized as they were in the original Grimm story. Keene sympathetically sees female manipulation as, more than anything, an effective tool for survival in a landscape where men dominate and where women like Katla and Margit’s mother are punished for chafing too harshly against the status quo. 

The movie, low-budget and with a rather airless quality that intimates Keene’s relative lack of filmmaking experience, is ultimately more admirable than it is absorbing. Its mutedness and coldness to the touch stymie the immediacy of the horrors and tragedy that guide the story, though Randy Sellars’ desolate, subtly ominous black-and-white cinematography makes the film consistently bewitching to look at. 

It’s always a pleasure to watch Björk, who co-formed the rock group The Sugarcubes around the time of the film’s making. The boundary-pushing singer-songwriter has been, since she became famous, celebrated for qualities that speak to the character she plays in The Juniper Tree, too. She’s almost otherworldly, like she had entry to a plane of existence to which the general population didn’t have access, while possessing a sharpness and cunning a rather whimsical front-facing public image doesn’t immediately reveal. It’s a joy to see that part of what has long made Björk so singular a presence was always there. She was a force of nature even before she’d broadcast it through music in a class of its own.