Lena Headey gives what could be one of the year's brightest breakthrough performances in Aberdeen, a weakly written, poorly paced film that has yet to find an American distributor despite being somewhat of a hit on the festival circuit.  It's a confusing road-trip flick, but Headey's terrific outing is more than enough to hold the mess together.

Headey (Gossip) plays Kaisa, a successful employee in one of London's biggest law firms and, as the film opens, the guest of honor at a party congratulating her on a recent promotion.  She's also a bit promiscuous, preferring anonymous sexual encounters to establishing any type of relationship with men.  Kaisa is in bed with another of her one-night stands when her mother, Helen (Charlotte Rampling, The Wings of the Dove), calls with a rather bizarre request.

It turns out that Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård, Dancer in the Dark), Kaisa's estranged, alcoholic father, has agreed to check himself into a detox program in Aberdeen.  Helen wants Kaisa to trek to Norway and escort Tomas from his Norwegian oil rig to Scotland, which the family once called home. She agrees after learning the incentive for completing the mission is Tomas' classic sports car that Kaisa has yearned for since she was a child.

Of course, like any road-trip film, things don't always go too smoothly. When Kaisa finally makes it to Norway, she finds a drunk, disheveled Tomas who knows nothing about the Aberdeen detox plan (Helen has a mysterious ulterior motive).  They butt heads, and it becomes clear that Kaisa must act as a parent to her infantile father, who repays her in vomit.  We learn through flashbacks that the two were once close, but Tomas abandoned Kaisa and her mother at a time when she needed a father figure the most.

The journey Kaisa and Tomas take is a little hard to follow.  There were a couple of moments in which I had no idea where Kaisa and Tomas were, or where they were supposed to be heading.  Aberdeen's story, co-written by Kristin Amundsen, Lars Bill Lundholm and the film's director, Hans Petter Moland, doesn't really offer anything new to the road-trip genre and, as a result, the film drags in several segments.

On the plus side, the acting in Aberdeen is first-rate.  Skarsgård and Spring Forward's Ian Hart (he plays a trucker who gets involved in Kaisa and Tomas' journey) turn in typically strong performances, but Headey steals the show as the long-legged vixen with more character flaws than a politician on the take (think of a taller, thinner Heather Langenkamp with a Scottish accent).  She's beautiful, confident and totally damaged all at once (and the accent doesn't hurt, either).

Viewers may notice a similarity between Aberdeen and Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves.  Both films were helmed by Scandinavian directors and featured both a young English actress portraying a Scot (Emily Watson in Waves), and Skarsgård playing a hard-drinking oil rig worker.

1:53 –

but contains nudity, sexual content, violence, adult language and drug/alcohol use