‘Butterfly’ review: Renate Reinsve crackles in intriguing but tonally frustrating Gran-Canaria set drama

Dir/scr: Itonje Soimer Guttormsen. Norway/Sweden/UK/Germany. 2026. 116mins

Two mixed-up sisters travel from wintry Scandinavia and Germany to the mild and sunny Canary Islands to bury their estranged mother in Norwegian director Itonje Soimer Guttormsen’s second feature. Renate Reinsve and Helen Bjornesby – last seen together in The Worst Person in the World – crackle in brittle, magnetic performances as the utterly different siblings, even as Butterfly loses its way, drifting from a pressure-cooker setup to a fizzling finale.

Drifts from a pressure-cooker setup to a fizzling finale

In her spiky but compelling 2021 debut Gritt, writer-director Soimer Guttormsen let a story find its own way along with the film’s difficult, abrasive central character. Similar risk-taking here yields diminishing dramatic returns, despite the bravura of Butterfly’s two leads and the film’s other substantial pleasure – its edgy, subversive soundtrack. But with its tough and sometimes sardonic perspective on the northern European search for southern warmth, authenticity and spiritual energy, the film has a certain resonance. And as a study of two damaged women stumbling their way into the start of a healing process, it reveals a surprisingly soft centre.

These disparate takeaways, plus the pull of the by-now globally recognizable and Oscar nominated Reinsve, are likely to give Butterfly – which was picked up by Protagonist ahead of its Rotterdam debut – a respectable arthouse run, especially in its four co-production territories.

We’re introduced to the two adult siblings in their respective home environments. Lily (Reinsve) is a Hamburg-based performance artist, androgynous and feral; at a pretentious art gallery opening we watch her screeching into a microphone with a long rubber penis swinging between her legs. Her older sister Diana (Bjornesby) is an infant school teacher with self-esteem issues and a possibly psychosomatic bad leg who lives and works in snow-bound provincial Norway. The pair clearly doesn’t have much to do with each other. But news that their ageing hippy mother has died, in a bizarre accident in the abandoned astronomical observatory that had become her home high up in the barren mountains of Gran Canaria, sends them both to the island where they were born and grew up.

Soimer Guttormsen’s vision of this holiday island has much in common with the sad, washed-out Tahiti of Claire Denis’ magnificently rebarbative The Intruder. This is the island paradise as real estate development, where pale holidaymakers jig to bland Europop poolside led by activity hosts in animal costumes. Here, Lily and Diana join their mother’s late-life partner Chato (played by Turkish-German actor and film producer Numan Acar), a gentle, rather dim spiritual traveller of a kind which these mountains seem to attract.

There’s a tonal dilemma at the heart of Butterfly that is sometimes intriguing, more often frustrating. Lily’s performance art is clearly laughable on one level but also visceral, coming from a deep place of pain. But when she arrives in Gran Canaria, this tall, angry, pale-skinned woman with her bleached eyebrows and ridiculously impractical hipster footwear turns out to have a sense of humour we can share. She explodes with disbelieving laughter at the absurdity of her late mother’s New Age posturings – as enshrined in a dipsy promotional video for a retreat the former resort worker and recovering alcoholic was hoping to launch. Soon enough, however, both she and Diana start to embrace the subculture. And as we watch Lily hug a white horse, we feel a certain nostalgia for the angry punk she once was.

It’s not just Lily and Diana but also Reinsve and Bjorneby who seem not quite to know how to handle the leaps of faith, and of character, that this thawing requires. Surely it can’t be as simple as the fact that a bit of Burning Man posturing can be good for the soul? Or is this ironic too?

Butterfly is chary with answers – but it does have some striking photography that makes the most of wild volcanic rockscapes and the sun’s glare on Nordic skin, and a quirky, attention grabbing soundtrack that mixes found tracks – including Linda Perhacs’ cult 1970 recording Parallelograms – with restless ambient music by former Simple Minds and A-ha keyboard player Erik Ljunggren.