"Everybody Loves Horses" is a 2025 TV comedy-drama directed by Inari Niemi and written by Hugleikur Dagsson and Tarja Kylmä. It is an ensemble piece held together by the Icelandic landscape, horse riding, and the criss-cross of hopes, desires, and disappointments of a group of Finnish friends and their Icelandic hosts. While a budding romance between two of the characters, a farm owner called Krúnka and a visiting Finn called Oskari, forms the main relationship to be explored across the show's four episodes, "Everybody Loves Horses" is more concerned with how love is interpreted, shared and even splintered during unlikely moments of cultural exchange and companionship. Language is given a central role in the drama: three languages are spoken, or perhaps it is more accurate to say four - Finnish, Finnish-English, Icelandic, and Icelandic-English - while the subtitles arguably add a fifth language, that of the translators' interpretations. I was surprised by the effectiveness of multilingualism in the show: rather than being something to negotiate or a necessary evil, multilingualism adds depth and nuance to the production including, in my view, in the following ways:
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| Pic by Kári Gíslason |
1) When characters switch to their 'home' language, they are able to express themselves openly without the non-speakers being able to understand. But, because the
viewer always knows what they're saying (through subtitles), these conversations take on a strange quality of shared private thoughts.
2) Language becomes a marker of both identity and character development: the characters seem slightly different people depending on the language they use.
3) English is the common language, but also a second language for everyone. When the Finns and the Icelanders speak to each other in English, they are both linguistically 'abroad', and the non-native quality of their conversations creates an alluring sense of exposure and uncertainty.
4) The pace of characters' understanding of events is to some extent defined by the language being used, with the result that the drama sometimes unfolds along parallel lines with different levels of comprehension. This creates some suspense but more importantly allows the action to be slowed for a realistic reason.
5) Language becomes a theme in itself, one that allows other concepts of language to accompany the characters' understanding of events, such as the languages we share with other animals (here, horses) and with our environment, especially farming land and tracks through wilderness areas.
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| Pic by Kári Gíslason |
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Pic by Kári Gíslason
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| Pic by Kári Gíslason |
