Man versus nature

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This article was published 23/02/2019 (2761 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This stripped-down survival story features Mads Mikkelsen and about 1,500 square kilometres of snow.

First-time feature director Joe Penna, who co-scripts with Ryan Morrison, keeps things elementally simple, which is an unusual and admirable strength, but also an occasional drawback.

Mikkelsen’s face is both stony and expressive. I’m not sure how that’s even possible, but it is, and Arctic rests on the 53-year-old Danish actor’s extraordinary visage. He plays a man named Overgard — or at least that’s the name on his parka. He has crashed somewhere in the Far North and has stayed by the downed plane, hoping for rescue.

He doesn’t have a backstory. He’s not peppy like Matt Damon in The Martian or raging like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant or chatty like Tom Hanks and his volleyball in Castaway. He’s stoic and disciplined and his only companionship comes from a high-performance watch that periodically beeps, keeping him on a rigid schedule — sleeping, waking, checking his fishing lines.

We get the feeling this has been going on for some time. Finally, a helicopter comes, only to crash in high winds, leaving a badly injured young woman (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) who drifts in and out of consciousness. Realizing that she needs medical help — and soon — Overgard makes the decision to leave the relative security of his base and head out on an uncertain journey towards a seasonal outpost.

He rigs up a harness so he can pull the young woman on a sled, along with a few basic supplies and a possibly unreliable map.

There’s a pared-down purity to this set-up. Penna’s direction is spare and unfussy, though he makes the most of the visual spectacle of the vast white landscape and the changeable, often threatening weather. The 99-minute runtime is almost dialogue-free, and the narrative has an unforced honesty: Overgard is competent but not superhuman, and his journey is more about sheer endurance than high adventure.

At about its midpoint, Arctic feels gruelling and relentless. Overgard eventually heads toward a breaking point, and even viewers sitting in a warm theatre might start to think it’s just too damn much. But Mikkelsen’s unyielding physical and emotional commitment keeps things going. He drags us with him, along with that sled.

Overgard’s obstacles are familiar — the cold, the hunger, the cliffs and crevasses, the obligatory post-Revenant bear. But the framework is different. Usually, the man-vs.-nature survival film is presented as a solitary struggle, a triumph of individual will.

Arctic is a moving affirmation of the need for human connection. Overgard does what he does not for himself but for another.

When he reassures the feverish young woman by repeating, “You’re not alone, you’re not alone,” he is saying this to himself as well. This makes for a subtle but significant repositioning of the survival genre.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca