What if One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had a baby with Icelandic bureaucracy and that baby grew up VERY chaotic?
Season 1 • Episode 9
LatestEinar, a charismatic history teacher is committed to a remote mental asylum in Iceland. During the bank holiday weekend he initiates an uprising that transforms into a proper revolution where the lunatics literally take over the asylum.
Set in 1992, Heimsendir is an isolated mental hospital on the outskirts of Reykjavík. The hospital, referred to as ‘World’s End’ is a last resort for many mental patients, many of whom consider it a home. Elementary school teacher, Einar, is committed against his will after a severe nervous breakdown and is critical about how things are run at the hospital and before long he has most of the patients on his side, rooting for change. Einar, along with the other patients, stages a revolution and takes over the hospital, declaring its a state within a state, a Utopia for the mentally ill.
Acting
Ensemble cast makes institutional chaos feel like home.
Writing
Balances systemic critique with genuine tenderness for the damaged.
Direction
Bragason finds beauty in fluorescent-lit corridors.
Creator
Ragnar Bragason
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Shot in a real decommissioned Icelandic mental hospital; former patients visited set and gave the cast their blessing.
The 1992 setting deliberately echoes Iceland's economic precarity before the boom — the hospital as microcosm of a nation ignoring its wounds.
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