Zero Kelvin

Set in the frozen, pristine wasteland of the Greenland coast during the 1920s, Zero Kelvin posits the destruction of several individuals' humanity over the course of one icy summer. Ostensibly a “thinking person's adventure film” (or so go the press notes), Molland's film is more a psychological suspense thriller, albeit one with a sometimes wearyingly languid pace. Eidsvold plays Henrik Larsen, a young poet and hopeless romantic from Norway, who leaves his fiancée Gertrude (Martens) to spend a year documenting the efforts of a pair of “outdoorsmen” trappers on the Greenland coast. Carrying a love note from his betrothed in his breast pocket and with his precious violin by his side, Henrik embarks on his mission with his naïveté in full bloom. He's not so much an innocent soul as he is a fool, but the bitter reality of his situation soon becomes all too apparent: Randbaek (Skarsgard, of last year's Breaking the Waves), the animalistic outpost foreman, views him as a weakling and a joke, while the studiously silent Holm (Sundquist) ignores him altogether. As the days pass and the three men struggle to meet their quota of furs and pelts, simmering tensions erupt between the violent, alcoholic Randbaek and the transposed poet Henrik. Before long, the foreman is regaling Henrik with tales of Gertrude's imagined improprieties during his absence, which culminate in a series of incidents that tear the three men apart, destroy the company's trapping operation, and ultimately end in bloodshed. Molland's film builds with a sly, steady power, and while the first third is a bit slow in places, the nerve-wracking tension steadily continues its terrible ascent. Although Zero Kelvin was not actually shot in Greenland, but instead in the more accessible Norwegian area of Svalgard, Molland's sweeping depictions of the trapper's snowbound home (what little there is: a wood and scrap-metal shack is pretty much the sum of it), the surrounding glaciers, and craggy mounts act as a sort of fourth character. Although the men are dependent on their surroundings for both food and shelter, it's also their greatest enemy. The nearest town is at least 60 miles away, and the company's supply ship won't be back for a year's time. As such, Molland fills his palette with grandiose long shots, dozens of them, which serve to imprint on the audience just how desperate the trappers' situation is. It's an awe-inspiring, terrible sense of isolation and spiritual malaise that Zero Kelvin manages to inspire, which, granted, doesn't make this the most upbeat of summer film choices. Still, tension like this should be savored, racheting up the frissons to the freezing point.