A lot of film business money is currently being spent on the immersive: finding the technology to make an audience feel they’re physically inside a movie. Maybe industry leaders should watch Godland, a dazzling slab of Icelandic arthouse made without a single computer effect. Yet the stark national landscape and punishing climate are rendered so vividly, you could swear you’re right there on the island’s south-east coast, drenched and shivering.
The film is the story of a callow 19th-century Danish priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), dispatched to build a church in the old Norse colonial outpost. He at least goes forewarned. Beware the impossible rivers, stinking volcanoes and midnight sun. (If the brief has a touch of Klaus Kinski, dragging a steamship across the Amazon in Fitzcarraldo, at least he could tell day from night.)
But Lucas descends not just with a cross but a camera, taking wet plate photographs of the pitiless country. Treat with a certain wariness the claim of a title card that the film is based on real pioneering snapshots taken by a visiting priest. As evidenced by a scene of unnerving folktales told around a fire, not every Icelandic story is to be taken literally. And if he finds them compelling subjects, Lucas also comes to loathe the taciturn locals. Mistrust cuts both ways. They are just as sceptical of the “Danish devil” in their midst, priggish and too hard on the horses. Language is a barrier. Mortality stalks. In time, love blooms as well, but the weather is still unspeakable.
Director Hlynur Pálmason passes judgment on neither his characters nor the country. “Terribly beautiful,” Lucas says. “Terrible and beautiful,” a native replies. If a film this filled with indelible images needs a mission statement, there it is: the eternal double-edge of things. And in Hove, it has a great lead, an actor with a permanent look of shock, and a gift for brilliantly unlikely slapstick. Just every now and then, he and Pálmason channel the ghost of Buster Keaton, a comic whose hallmark joke was an indifferent world making punchlines out of people. Godland gives that world a name: Iceland.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from April 7
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