Godland review – a priest's soul-shaking journey across Iceland – The Guardian
“It’s terribly lovely,” says a troubled Danish priest on this Nineteenth-century questing story from Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason, whose earlier movie A White, White Day was his nation’s official submission for the 92nd Academy Awards. “Sure, it’s horrible,” comes the reply, “… and delightful.” It’s a refined distinction, however one which lies on the coronary heart of Pálmason’s quietly soul-shaking and wryly satirical epic, a cinematic tone poem that the film-maker describes as being “about interior and outer conflicts”, about miscommunication, and “a journey into ambition, love and religion, and the concern of God”.
Elliott Crosset Hove performs an bold and zealous younger Lutheran priest, Lucas, who’s tasked by his superiors with travelling from Denmark to the distant wilds of colonised Iceland to arrange a church. His vacation spot could also be below Danish rule however the two territories are worlds aside, in each sense. As Lucas is informed, his journey will deliver him face-to-face with a world that’s “very completely different” from the one he is aware of, whether or not it’s “the folks, the climate”, or a volcano that smells like “the Earth has shat its pants”. Crucially, Lucas should be taught to “adapt” reasonably than lose his thoughts – one thing that proves tougher than anticipated for this stern-faced soul, whose religion begins to crack when confronted with the cruel majesty of God’s creation. No marvel the movie’s authentic title (impressed by a poem by Matthías Jochumsson, considerably offered on display in each Danish and Icelandic) interprets extra precisely as “Wretched Land”.
Lucas is a photographer, and Pálmason takes delight within the tactile practicalities of the wet-plate course of he makes use of: separating egg whites to be smeared on the imaging glass; burying himself below the death-like cowl of his instrument. Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff completely captures the aesthetics of Lucas’s photos, including softening rounded edges to the movie’s squarish Academy ratio, with black borders framing the pictures like photos at an exhibition. Her digital camera is basically static, mirroring the tripoded nature of Lucas’s portraits, with audacious lengthy takes and gradual pans that unfold to highly effective impact.
From sodden mud to jarring rocks and swollen rivers, Lucas’s quest is fraught with peril, and the fixed menace of failure if not dying. But as Lucas declares: “A lot of the divine piles up in me that I can not die…” As a substitute he troopers on, led by taciturn information Ragnar, performed with dismissive stoicism by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson. Whereas Lucas’s head could also be within the clouds, Ragnar is fabricated from earthier stuff and harbours little affection for his clerical companion. It’s clear from the outset that they are going to come to blows, each psychological and bodily.
The second half of the movie has a extra painterly environment, with stark out of doors vistas giving approach to Vermeer-like interiors as we arrive at our vacation spot. Right here, Lucas wrestles with Ragnar and along with his personal demons, stuffily refusing to conduct companies whereas the church continues to be half-built, but in some way ingratiating himself with the area people whose religious lives he guarantees to information. There’s even the prospect of affection, though inside this ruggedly insular settlement the method of integration appears extra mysterious than the magical components utilized in Lucas’s photographic slides.
Songs are sung to the climate and to waterfalls, with accordion-led dances and plaintive homicide ballads offering sardonic commentary on the motion. In the meantime, musician Alex Zhang Hungtai presents sparse however hanging ambient accompaniment, his improvised wind instrument riffs mixing seamlessly with the infinite sounds of gusty rain – for which Icelandic, as Lucas discovers, has many phrases.
There’s a powerful ingredient of delusion and magic at work right here too, most notably within the recitation of an eerie dream about mating eels and mass infidelity, and within the sight of the physique of a horse rotting over a interval of years and returning to the earth. All of it provides to the movie’s haunting attraction, leaving the viewer with a way of being engulfed by a panorama during which cultures collide – the incarnate and the infinite ceaselessly butting heads, neither prepared to concede hard-won floor.
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