Arctic, the directorial debut from YouTube personality Joe Penna, is nothing if not an exercise in economy. We don’t need to know what we don’t need to know.
We first see the protagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen, shoveling snow, alone, an infinite abyss of powder sprawling in all directions. When he’s done, an overhead shot reveals the site-specific art he’s just created: the letters “SOS” carved into the white. Minutes later, we discern that his small plane has crashed in the Arctic.
What he was doing in this harsh climate, his family life (if any) back home in Denmark, his opinions on Brexit, even his first name, are all immaterial. There is no past or future, only an unforgiving present, where every day is a slog through a perilous void. Arctic is a survivalist movie in the purest sense, the leanest and most existential of its kind since Robert Redford’s career-best turn in All Is Lost.
Mikkelsen’s character — his surname is Overgard, which we glean from a close-up of his work badge — marks time with his durable wristwatch, and records the passing days the way a prisoner would in an old movie, by scratching them off in groups of five. He spends daylight hours projecting “help” signals into the ether from a hand-crank radio, on the off chance a rescue plane enters his airspace. He survives on raw trout. On the bright side, ice water is not a problem, and though he’s often filmed like an astronaut marooned on an uninhabitable planet, at least he never has to resort to feasting on potatoes grown from his own feces.
Eventually, to his surprise and perhaps ours, his radio picks up a signal: A helicopter appears, but its attempt to land is thwarted by a snowstorm. No sooner has Overgard’s godsend appeared that it, too, has crashed in the snow and burst into flames, leaving only an Icelandic female copilot, played by María Thelma Smáradóttir, alive, but critically wounded.
So Overgard doesn’t have a savior so much as a dependent — an immobile and incommunicative piece of cargo to be soldiered through impossible terrain, inch by inch, day by day, en route to a potential rescue point indicated on the woman’s map.
Among other things, Arctic is an effective rebuke to 2017’s romance The Mountain Between Us, whose desperate trek played more like a cruise excursion, culminating in the discovery of a deus ex cabin filled with warmth, beans and Love Potion No. 9. In Arctic, this man and this woman are the only people on Earth for thousands of miles, but they’re too busy, you know … dying to fall in love.
You feel their pain viscerally. Overgard is, admittedly, the ideal survivalist, imbued with the right wiles, instincts and MacGyverish ability to repurpose tools. Yet the movie’s eternal hopelessness seems into every frame. And when it’s not hopeless, it’s harrowing, with polar bears and sinkholes complicating his mission at key intervals, like programmed impediments in a video game. Just when you think the film can’t get any bleaker — say, Overgard’s Sisyphean struggle to lug the dead weight of his mostly comatose passenger up a dangerously steep mountain — things get worse.
Director Penna, already an accomplished storyteller, never ceases to remind us of this couple’s isolation through brutal, unforgiving wide shots of a land that will, in all likelihood, swallow up any sorry mortal stranded on it. Much of the photography, by Tómas Örn Tómasson, takes your breath away in the manner of an IMAX documentary, but with that format’s wonder replaced by desolation.
Just how much of this that we viewers are expected to stomach is a valid question. Arctic is certainly a powerful testament to the will to live, but it feels like a kind of penance. It is an endurance test for its audience as much as its actors. (Mikkelsen has said that the 19-day shoot was the most difficult of his career, and it shows.) It is a film to be suffered through, not enjoyed.
Only in this manner does this draining experiment fall just short of All Is Lost. That film married its sense of desperation with the imaginative spirit of an inventor trying his hardest to build a better mousetrap in impossible conditions. It engaged the brain, whereas Penna’s film, for all its pure intentions, strands it in a block of ice.
ARCTIC. Director: Joe Penna; Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, María Thelma Smáradóttir; Distributor: Bleecker Street; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Todaya at AMC CityPlace 20 in West Palm Beach, Downtown at the Mall 16 in Palm Beach Gardens, Cinepolis 14 in Jupiter and the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, among others