While Joe Penna's directorial debut is just another film about people stranded in the bleak, unforgiving cold, which has similar elements of other survival movies like Cast Away, 127 hours, All Is Lost, or most recently, The Mountain Between Us, but there's something unique about Arctic that makes the film stand out and feel new.
One of the main attractions about this Iceland/US co-production is that the film features the talented Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, who perhaps is best known for playing villains in Casino Royale and Doctor Strange, as well as TV's Hannibal.
Here, in the role of Overgard, he plays a downed pilot alone in a frozen wasteland as he attempts to survive against an unforgiving and savage land. As it's basically a one man film, Arctic is definitely the Mikkelsen show, and yet one of his most powerful, and moving performances to date.
The film begins with a black screen and sound of boots crunching on snow. Then come the images of Overgard doing his surviving activities on the wasteland. There's no explanation of why he crashed or his exact location. There is also no backstory or dialogue to establish who Overgard is or what motivates him beyond survival. What we know is he is stranded in this middle of nowhere for an amount of time in the Arctic tundra, perhaps weeks, but not months.
In any other movie we may cringe at the survivalist's repeated mistakes as he pushes on. In Arctic, Overgard seems to do everything right. He clearly has survival training and is putting his knowledge to good use. He has formed systems for his day-to-day life of survival. He sets up an elaborate ice-fishing rig, and eats a cold fish he caught sashimi style, and sleeps in the body of his crashed plane.
He spends time during the day trying to activate the radio, vainly signalling for help, or digging in the snow to form a gigantic SOS sign that will hopefully be visible to planes.
Help does come, in the form of a helicopter that crashes, killing the pilot and severely injuring the co-pilot (Thai-Icelandic actress Maria Thelma Smaradottir). Overgard stitches up her stomach wound, but he knows she won't survive unless he can get her to the mountains.
With a new-found sense of purpose, he leaves his relatively safe shelter and sets out to a distant research station, dragging his new companion on a sled thru the snow in search of help.
Unlike the typical Hollywood survival films that involve high drama or heroic acts, the direction in Arctic aims to reflect minimalism. It's a slow, visual storytelling, and is stripped back to the essentials with minimal narrative and dialogue.
The cinéma vérité style and lack of turning points in Arctic may not appeal to a wide audience. The slow, repetitive scenes can also test a viewer's patience. Whether you find the film worth watching or not will come down to your own expectations, or how much you can put those expectations on hold. The film tests its audience's endurance.
Without those expectations, Arctic is a well-done, spare survival film that is worth seeing for Mikkelsen's outstanding performance, as he portrays Overgard with a bracing humanity who you root for every step of the way.
The film also is graced with hauntingly stunning location photography, thanks to the white landscapes beautifully captured and composed by cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson. The visuals in Arctic is an essential example of why "big screen" movies and theatres still exist in the Netflix era. Arctic locks the audience into an endless snow-covered setting that feels unrelentingly real, isolating and inescapable.
