Take a stab at picking two of the oddest of world cultures for your film and the chances are you'll alight on either Japan or Iceland, and very possibly both. Japan. We all know (or don't) about Japan. But Iceland? With its 260,000 population, oddball alcohol laws, ubiquitous chess, more writers per capita than any other country, the lowest church going population in Europe and, paradoxically, highest belief in God. And elves. Cool country.

Very very cool country in Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's Cold Fever. Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase) is a man of modern Japan. He doesn't buy those old ways, the ancient rituals. So when his grandfather bangs on at him to throw over a fortnight's golf holiday to travel to the remote river where his parents died, the boy is naturally reluctant. But tradition counts for something and Hirata is soon on a plane to the gloriously frozen landscape of northern Europe.

But Reykjavik is just the start of this mini-epic quest to his parents' memory. He buys a car and is off, encountering Jack and Jill, a brace of crazed Americans with a dark secret, Icelandic cowboys, a girl whose screams can shatter ice floes, and an eccentric young woman who records funerals. And all of it to the constant throb of mindless Icelandic pop pumped out of a radio with a broken knob.

A road movie then, and one that, even at a casual glance, owes an obvious debt to Jim Jarmusch. More, producer and co-writer Jim Stark was also producer on Jarmusch's Down By Law, and Nagase so memorable as one of the super-cool Japanese Elvisites in the American's best film, the delicious Mystery Train. And like those pictures, Cold Fever is not over-burdened with plot. Nagase could be doing this for any reason at all, which is maybe why the final ceremony rings a little hollow. It's the sort a spiritual coda that Jarmusch would never do. Clearly, sometimes it is better to travel in hope than to arrive.

Still, that's only five minutes out of a brief 85 and the rest is well up to scratch. The dialogue is snappy and funny, the landscape Nagase travels both fierce and beautiful. He did choose to visit during the island's winter after all, and half of cinematographer Ari Kristinsson's job is pretty much done for him by just pointing the camera. He shoots the Japanese section small, exploding it spectacularly into glorious widescreen as we descend on the island. And then there's all that horrendous music...

Of course it nudges a bit towards being so hip it hurts, carrying more than enough frosty cool to rival the country it's set in. It even goes so far as to cast Seijun Suzuki, director of Japanese 'cult classic' Tokyo Drifter as the grandfather. But in the end Cold Fever gets cross-cultural without being either sickeningly whimsical (Local Hero) or outright offensive (the shameful Rising Sun springs to mind), is economic (something Jarmusch could learn), and ultimately rather touching.