Harshness is transformed into beauty and then terror by this extraordinary film from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason about a 19th-century Danish pastor sent to establish a new church on Iceland’s remote south-eastern coast. I left the cinema dazed and elated by its artistry; it is breathtaking in its epic scale, magnificent in its comprehension of landscape, piercingly uncomfortable in its human intimacy and severity. There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad. There are echoes of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Roland Joffé’s The Mission, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja – and even Howard Hawks’s Red River.
Pálmason announces in the opening credits that the story was inspired by the supposed discovery in Iceland of seven glass-plate photographs of people and places taken there at the end of the 19th century. While the claim is a deadpan fiction, his screen has an almost square 1.33:1 aspect ratio, perhaps in honour of the still photograph motif. This smaller-size, in such contradistinction to the movie’s CinemaScope ambition and spectacle, gives a density to the viewing experience.
