Why are people so frigid when it comes to foreign films? When Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, upon receiving a Golden Globe for his 2019 drama Parasite, spoke wryly about overcoming “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”, his words were tinged with a long-held truth. For many people, foreign cinema has always been a daunting proposition, a confection to be enjoyed by snobs and dyed-in-the-wool cinephiles. “Foreign film” is, of course, an umbrella term too wide to be useful: works of accessible pop entertainment like Seven Samurai or Playtime are lumped in with challenging arthouse fare like Jeanne Dielman. But it’s a term that persists in the minds of the public. With a few very occasional exceptions – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Life is Beautiful – foreign-language films have always struggled to find a wide audience in the West. And yet, look at the UK’s current Netflix film rankings, and you will see a foreign-language feature sitting atop the chart. Sacré bleu.
The film, Troll, is a Norwegian monster movie, in which humankind is pitted against a folkloric creature that has awakened deep in the mountains of Dovre. There’s plenty of fraught family melodrama before the big finish – an improbable CGI goliath running amok in urban Norway – but Ibsen this obviously is not. Troll is a strange film, a clunky, eccentric B-movie that lurches between tones and rote genre tropes. Despite warm reviews from the handful of English-language outlets that covered it, audiences haven’t exactly been loving it (if a resolutely ambivalent 50 per cent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is any indicator). But the fact that a film as weird and schlocky as Troll is able to find an audience on Netflix speaks to one of the streaming platform’s greatest virtues.
