“It’s terribly beautiful,” says a troubled Danish priest in this 19th-century questing tale from Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason, whose previous film A White, White Day was his country’s official submission for the 92nd Academy Awards. “Yes, it’s terrible,” comes the reply, “… and beautiful.” It’s a subtle distinction, but one that lies at the heart of Pálmason’s quietly soul-shaking and wryly satirical epic, a cinematic tone poem that the film-maker describes as being “about inner and outer conflicts”, about miscommunication, and “a journey into ambition, love and faith, and the fear of God”.
Elliott Crosset Hove plays an ambitious and zealous young Lutheran priest, Lucas, who is tasked by his superiors with travelling from Denmark to the remote wilds of colonised Iceland to set up a church. His destination may be under Danish rule but the two territories are worlds apart, in every sense. As Lucas is told, his journey will bring him face-to-face with a world that is “very different” from the one he knows, whether it’s “the people, the weather”, or a volcano that smells like “the Earth has shat its pants”. Crucially, Lucas must learn to “adapt” rather than lose his mind – something that proves harder than expected for this stern-faced soul, whose faith starts to crack when confronted with the harsh majesty of God’s creation. No wonder the film’s original title (inspired by a poem by Matthías Jochumsson, significantly presented on screen in both Danish and Icelandic) translates more accurately as “Wretched Land”.
Lucas is a photographer, and Pálmason takes delight in the tactile practicalities of the wet-plate process he uses: separating egg whites to be smeared on the imaging glass; burying himself under the death-like cowl of his instrument. Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff perfectly captures the aesthetics of Lucas’s pictures, adding softening rounded edges to the film’s squarish Academy ratio, with black borders framing the images like pictures at an exhibition. Her camera is largely static, mirroring the tripoded nature of Lucas’s portraits, with audacious long takes and slow pans that unfold to powerful effect.
From sodden mud to jarring rocks and swollen rivers, Lucas’s quest is fraught with peril, and the constant threat of failure if not death. Yet as Lucas declares: “So much of the divine piles up in me that I cannot die…” Instead he soldiers on, led by taciturn guide Ragnar, played with dismissive stoicism by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson. While Lucas’s head may be in the clouds, Ragnar is made of earthier stuff and harbours little affection for his clerical companion. It’s clear from the outset that they will come to blows, both mental and physical.
The second half of the film has a more painterly atmosphere, with stark outdoor vistas giving way to Vermeer-like interiors as we arrive at our destination. Here, Lucas wrestles with Ragnar and with his own demons, stuffily refusing to conduct services while the church is still half-built, yet somehow ingratiating himself with the local community whose spiritual lives he promises to guide. There’s even the prospect of love, although within this ruggedly insular settlement the process of integration seems more mysterious than the magical elements used in Lucas’s photographic slides.
Songs are sung to the weather and to waterfalls, with accordion-led dances and plaintive murder ballads providing sardonic commentary on the action. Meanwhile, musician Alex Zhang Hungtai offers sparse but striking ambient accompaniment, his improvised wind instrument riffs blending seamlessly with the endless sounds of gusty rain – for which Icelandic, as Lucas discovers, has many words.
There’s a strong element of myth and magic at work here too, most notably in the recitation of an eerie dream about mating eels and mass infidelity, and in the sight of the body of a horse rotting over a period of years and returning to the earth. It all adds to the film’s haunting appeal, leaving the viewer with a sense of being engulfed by a landscape in which cultures collide – the incarnate and the infinite forever butting heads, neither willing to concede hard-won ground.
