Arctic ***½ (2018, Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) – Movie Review

Mads Mikkelsen stars in co-writer/ director Joe Penna’s 2018 survival thriller Arctic as Overgård, an incredibly strong, brave and resourceful man who desperately tries to survive the Arctic after a plane crash.

[Spoiler alert] His his long-awaited rescue is in sight when a helicopter hoves into view, but a blizzard takes the chopper down, killing the pilot and badly wounding a young moman (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) passenger. Now Overgård has got two people to try to save against impossible odds.

He keeps telling the Young Woman that it will be OK, but this is false optimism, and he is faced with the choice of what he thinks might be the lesser of two evils. Should he remain in the relative safety of his encampment at the site of his downed plane, and wait for the remote chance of rescue, or start a potentially deadly trek through the snowy wastes for possible salvation at a base camp?

Mikkelsen is great, putting his very considerable all into it, filming in what convincingly look like very difficult circumstances. The essence of manliness, he convinces every painful step of the way. The story is a bit cheesy and corny, and we have seen this survival story many times before, recently in the similar but much less good The Mountain Between Us, with Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, and much better in the 2013 sea-saga All Is Lost with Robert Redford. More recently, just this year, Shailene Woodley survived the Adrift sea survival movie.

Familiar or not, nevertheless co-writer/ director Joe Penna makes a good job of Arctic, keeping it crisp, clean and spare – and cold! It is hard to spend an hour and a half or so watching a man suffering so dreadfully, but, if we really have to, Mikkelsen is our man, a manly man to get through a crisis with honour and grace.

We learn very little about the character of Overgård. There is no back story or prelude to the plane crash. The movie starts with the noise of shovelling, and opens to show Overgård digging out a huge SOS in the snow. Talking of snow, there is never the impression of a camera team anywhere. Overgård seems truly alone in the elements, abandoned to his predicament.

It is filmed in Iceland, the country not the chain store, and is an Icelandic production. Mads Mikkelsen is Danish, but, when he speaks, which is very rarely, it is almost always in English.

Arctic received a 10-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, though it won nothing. But there was no applause at the London Film Festival press screening, where they turned up the air conditioning in NFT3 to freezing to suit the mood, which they surely must have done deliberately as part of the show. It is not really a festival film, though it is welcome among a collection of actual art movies as a smartly made more commercial cousin of the art movie.

It is the first feature film of Penna, who started making videos on Youtube in 2006.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com