[rating=8.00]
Mads Mikkelson is easily one of our most entrancing, captivating actors. Ever since his breakout performance in 2006’s Casino Royale, he’s been kind of performer who can do so much with so little. In the tragically short-lived TV series, Hannibal, Mikkelson took one of the most iconic movie characters of all time, Hannibal Lector, and made it entirely his own—very nearly upstaging Sir Anthony Hopkins in the process. In Valhalla Rising, he created one of the most memorable action characters in years without uttering a single line of dialogue.
Now we get to see him carry an entire movie by himself. Arctic is a rare tale of survival that’s edge-of-your-seat mesmerizing for the entirety of its 97-minute runtime. Director and co-writer Joe Penna stuns with his first feature length motion picture, throwing down a harrowing gauntlet of a tale that pushes the limits of survival.
Mikkelson stars as Overgard, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Arctic who has been making due with what he can for an unspecified length of time. He spends his days mapping his immediate area and trying to figure out just where he is. His relatively safe existence is threatened when a rescue helicopter crashes, killing the pilot and leaving an unnamed young woman (Maria Thelma Smaradottir) barely clinging to survival. Left with no choice, Overgard must head out into the Arctic in order to find help before he and his unconscious companion perish.
There’s an elegant humanity in Mikkelson’s performance that subtly reveals itself as the film goes on. Though we know nothing about Overgard—not who he is or where he comes from or why he’s there or how his plane crashed—Mikkelson captures the heart of struggle to survive with his every choice. In the hands of a lesser actor, Arctic would have easily descended into a dull quagmire, despite Penna’s talents as a director and writer.
For his part, Penna manages to bring us almost too close to the dangers of the Arctic, a land haunted by desolation and polar bears. In those environs safety does not exist and both his story and his direction bring us face to face with the dangers that lurk in every step of that bitter cold wasteland to the north. Though punctuated by moments of legit dread, what works best is the creeping, omnipresent danger of the unknown, where the environment itself is almost actively trying to kill you
Arctic is a sparse film, where very little seems to happen while still managing to pull you in and engage you with one man’s fight against the forces of nature. It’s almost koan-like in its presentation, tempting us to engage with our own humanity and forcing us to wonder what we would do—what we would be capable of doing—in order to survive. It’s one of the best debuts from a director in years, and yet another example of the kind of talent we have in an actor like Mikkelson.
Arctic is now playing in select theaters.
