Arctic eftir Joe Penna, fær jákvæða umsögn Lee Marshall hjá ScreenDaily en myndin er sýnd í hliðarprógrammi Cannes hátíðarinnar, Midnight Madness. Myndin er meðframleidd af Pegasus Pictures og starfslið er að mestu íslenskt; Tómas Örn Tómasson er tökumaður, Atli Geir Grétarsson sér um leikmynd og Ragna Fossberg um förðun, svo nokkrir séu nefndir. Mads Mikkelsen og María Thelma Smáradóttir fara með hlutverkin í myndinni.
Í umsögn segir meðal annars:
It’s a smart move – very nearly an arthouse one – to open after the disaster, not with it. When we first meet Mikklelsen’s character Overgård, he’s meticulously clearing snow away from the tundra to create what is revealed to be a giant SOS sign. He’s clearly been stuck here for a while, holed up in a crashed prop plane somewhere in this icy desert.
A bright, crimson-jacketed figure in a waste of white, Overgård goes through a set routine designed to keep body and hope together: checking for bites from the fish under the ice on the lines he’s rigged up over a frozen lake; trudging through the snow to high ground in order to crank a hand-winched emergency locator transmitter; forcing himself to keep to a rigid timetable, his harrowed, driven face suggesting that despair is easier to live with if you can divide it up into chunks of focused time.
An ominous polar bear sighting is soon followed by a moment of desperate hope, but the helicopter that has been sent to rescue Overgård is itself dashed to the ground by a blizzard – leaving him to care for the one survivor, a female co-pilot (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) who is seriously wounded, and will spend most of the rest of the film in a semi-comatose state.
Survival films so often coerce jeopardy out of uncharacteristic moments of stupidity, and Arctic is no exception. After Overgård has set out on foot, dragging his injured charge on a sledge behind him (itself a questionable decision), there’s at least one tension-racking setback that will have the audience screaming “But why didn’t he just…?”
Better to focus on the smaller moments, which is what Arctic does best: the joy of finding a disposable lighter in the downed helicopter, the satisfaction of covering another few hundred metres of tundra, and having just enough energy left to dig a snowhole. An electronic score that is big on long-held Mahler-like chords underlines both the majesty of the film’s implacable natural setting, as well as the grace notes and sombre basslines of the small human drama which is unfurling here. And if there’s ultimately something just a little too linear in the main character’s near silent progression, there’s no denying the director’s efficient management of a crescendo we’ve seen so many few times before.
Sjá nánar hér: ‘Arctic’: Cannes Review
