Hans Petter Moland uses remote landscapes to make difficult company harder to escape. We rate his patient handling of actors and setting, though Zero Kelvin shows how sustained antagonism can leave too little else to discover.
Fi1m perspective
In Zero Kelvin (1995), the men have an Arctic landscape around them and nowhere that seems to offer relief from one another. Moland makes the open space oppressive without treating the people as incidental figures in an attractive view. It is a tense, patient thriller, and the clearest reason we have for recommending his work. The reservation is there too: he keeps returning to the same antagonism until we begin to want another kind of encounter.
That early drama was followed by Aberdeen (2000), before comedy became a more prominent part of his work. A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010), about an ex-convict, continued his collaboration with Stellan Skarsgård. In Order of Disappearance (2014) made the turn towards black-comedy thrillers explicit, handling absurd humour and revenge with assurance. He remade it in English as Cold Pursuit (2019), with Liam Neeson. The remake is more conventional, and its mixture of humour and violence is less settled.
The care with actors matters as much as the changes of genre. Moland plans composed shots with his cinematographers while leaving room for the performers to work within a take. In Zero Kelvin, Philip Øgaard makes the Arctic large enough to dwarf the men, with little in the view to suggest comfort. We felt hemmed in by those expanses because the distance made the men's conflict seem harder to escape. Skarsgård keeps us interested in the human friction even when the film risks exhausting our patience with it.
Careful composition can become a problem elsewhere. The polished images of Out Stealing Horses (2019), adapted from Per Petterson’s novel, sometimes simplify what the writing leaves complicated. We prefer the direct discomfort of Zero Kelvin, where the landscape has a clear effect on how we watch the characters. The antagonism is wearing, but the performances keep it from becoming merely repetitive. Start there, provided the prospect of a tense evening with little relief appeals.
Biography
Hans Petter Moland is a Norwegian film director. He was born on 17 October 1955 in Oslo and trained at Emerson College in Boston. He began his career directing award-winning commercials before making his feature debut with The Last Lieutenant (1993).
Moland is known for films including Zero Kelvin (1995), Aberdeen (2000), The Beautiful Country (2004), A Somewhat Gentle Man (2010), In Order of Disappearance (2014), Out Stealing Horses (2019) and Cold Pursuit (2019). He has frequently collaborated with actor Stellan Skarsgård. He is married to film director and screenwriter Maria Sødahl.
