Godland
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason
Running time: 2hrs19 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Elliott Crosset Hove stars in Godland
Stern of face and sensibility, Danish priest Lucas (a marvellous Elliott Crosset Hove) washes up on the stark, startling shores of Iceland, determined to set up a parish in the new land’s great, ungentrified nowhere. It is the late 19th century, and Iceland is at this point a remote Danish territory, with the emphasis on “remote”: the confident young preacher finds himself unmoored from the start, never at home with the forbidding landscape or its understandably wary locals. One wonders why he’s so desperate to bring his rigid, rule-bound Lutheran faith to this wilderness anyway; its awesome vastness and forbidding beauty seem the work of a creator with a very different plan from his.
Godland, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s mighty new film, is thus titled with a stoic irony that reflects both the severity of its philosophical enquiries, and the quiet wryness of its humour. It manages the rare trick of treating religion — ever a touchy subject, in film as in life — with equal parts earnest, ascetic tragedy and searing absurdism. Moreover, when it sets aside the Bible, it’s as savage (and savagely funny) a study of masculine hubris and entitlement as any you’ve seen recently (topping even Pálmason’s fine previous film, the quakingly testosterone-driven revenge parable A White, White Day), all the while delineating and diminishing the mentality of the colonist in matters of geography and theology alike.
It’s a lot of movie, in other words, yet it never feels top-heavy or self-important: for a devoutly agnostic study of a Christian mission, it more than once achieves a genuine, shimmery sense of grace. Lucas is, alongside his priestly calling, a passionate amateur photographer, and Godland views his ravishing new environment as he would like it captured in his lens: replicating the boxy framing and rheumy light of early photography, Pálmason and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff avoid easy, pretty pictorialism to instead actively watch the land, sea and weather, to patiently capture how they move and brighten and occasionally curdle each other. Godland is no travelogue, but it is transporting in the most essential sense: it sets its dark, violent, sometimes perversely petty human drama against a natural world so strange and spectacular and seemingly infinite that you can understand both how a man of God might believe it to be the work of his master, and how unbelievers deem it something so much bigger than that.
GODLAND (2022) Written by Hlynur Pálmason | Shot by Maria von Hausswolff | Edited by Julius Krebs Damsbo
Now in UK cinemas