Hlynur Pálmason’s film about a Danish priest crossing Iceland to build a church is severe, patient and, to our surprise, often funny. Maria von Hausswolff’s square-framed photography does most of the talking, and at 143 minutes the film could have talked a little less.
Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is a young Danish priest with a mission and a camera. Vincent (Waage Sandø), the superior who sends him, tells him to sail round to a settlement on Iceland’s far coast, build a church before winter and photograph the people. Lucas decides instead to land on the near side and cross the island on horseback, to photograph it on the way. Everyone he meets thinks this is foolish, and they are right. Hlynur Pálmason’s film is a fine one and a long one, and we recommend it with the plain warning that it moves at the pace of a loaded horse.
Maria von Hausswolff shoots on 35mm in the near-square Academy ratio, and the shape of the frame does much of the arguing. A widescreen Iceland would have looked like a holiday. This one looks like a wall: rock, moss, cloud and river stacked one on top of the other, and the men crossing the bottom of it take up almost nothing. Julius Krebs Damsbo cuts without hurry and with dry timing: a wide shot of the party picking across a valley, held until it starts to feel like a painting, then the same party in the next shot, not visibly further along.
Lucas’s photographs are a separate matter. The camera he has carried over the sea is heavy, the plates take minutes to expose, and Pálmason stages each one as a small ceremony, the subject holding still while the priest fusses under his cloth. The film’s own look is modelled on photographs of this kind. Ragnar (Ingvar E. Sigurðsson), the Icelandic guide, submits to the lens the way a horse submits to a bridle.
Ragnar is the best thing in the film. He speaks no Danish, Lucas speaks no Icelandic, and a translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) stands between them tidying up what each has said. Sigurðsson plays him as a man who made up his mind about the priest in the first ten minutes and sees no reason to revisit it. We laughed more than we expected, mostly at him, because he has a gift for doing exactly what Lucas has asked in the way least likely to please him. Hove lets Lucas thin out: the collar goes grey, the cheeks go hollow, and the certainty stays put long after the body has given up on it.
The scene that frightened us is a river crossing. The water is brown and fast and up to the horses’ chests, the camera sits down near the surface, and there is no music, only water and breathing and tack creaking. We were sure someone would go under. Elsewhere Pálmason leaves his camera on a dead horse and lets the seasons pass over it in a minute. It is the bleakest image in the film, and we found it oddly steadying. The country takes everything back and is in no hurry.
The second half reaches the settlement, where Carl (Jacob Lohmann), a Danish farmer, lives with his daughters Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir). Frosti Fridriksson’s production design gives Carl a low turf-roofed house and, going up plank by plank beside it, a timber church that plainly belongs to another country. Nina Grønlund dresses the settlers in oiled wool and the priest in black cloth that the weather steadily unpicks. Alex Zhang Hungtai’s score is a handful of long, low tones that arrive rarely enough to count as events. Sonne’s Anna is watchful and unimpressed, the only person who treats Lucas as neither a nuisance nor a superior. What follows between priest, guide and family takes turns we will not describe.
We would cut ten minutes. A wedding in the settlement, with its accordion and dancing, runs on past the point where it has told us what it needs to, and a few of the second-half landscapes are there for their own sake. The story, once its pieces are in place, goes more or less where you think it will. It matters less than it might, because the film is not asking whether Lucas will fail but how long he can go on believing he is the hero of a place that has not noticed him.
Films about men who walk into a wilderness and come apart usually give the wilderness at least one shot as an ally. Pálmason never does. See this on the biggest screen you can find, with your phone in another room. It asks for two hours and twenty-three minutes of your patience and pays most of them back.
