“Arctic,” a notably quiet and captivating slow-build adventure film, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a researcher-explorer who has crash-landed in the frozen wilderness, is the latest example of a genre we know in our bones, one that feels so familiar it’s almost comforting. It’s another solo-survival movie, one more tale of a shipwrecked soul that derives its spirit and design from the mythic fable of the form, “Robinson Crusoe.”
The challenge of watching a stranded man toil away on his own, of course, is that it seems, on the surface, to be inherently undramatic. That’s why nearly every one of these movies has had a buried hook, a way of turning a barren situation into compulsively watchable and suspenseful storytelling. “Robinson Crusoe” (the novel, published in 1719, and its various film versions) set the template by presenting its tale as one of human ingenuity.
In essence, it prophesied the Industrial Revolution in the form of a stripped-down one-man show. “Cast Away” had Wilson the soccer ball and Tom Hanks’ plucky enterprise. “127 Hours” had James Franco, as a hiker trapped in a rocky wedge, nattering into his video camera. “All Is Lost,” set on a sailboat adrift at sea, had Robert Redford’s finely aging regret and his character’s technical instincts. “Robinson Crusoe” had Friday.
The hook of “Arctic,” which was shot in Iceland, is that it has none of those things. It’s the first feature directed by Joe Penna, the protean Brazilian video auteur who became a sensation on YouTube, so you might expect it to be made with a touch of 21st-century flash. On the contrary: Penna tells this tale of self-rescue with a plainly carpentered austerity that makes it feel, at times, like you’re seeing an ice-cap remake of “A Man Escaped.” There are no cut corners, no overly blatant only-in-the-movies gambits. Mikkelsen’s stranded pilot has little to rely on beyond his will, so we feel at every step that he could truly be us.
The result is that it takes a bit of time for “Arctic” to get rolling. It opens not with a bang but with an eerie plunge into the anti-dramatic post-crash void: Here is Mikkelsen’s lone survivor (he is never named), in his dirty insulated jacket, scratching at the black ground beneath the snow, the camera revealing that he has etched the giant letters “SOS” into the white tundra.
The landscape is mostly flat, but in the distance are streaked gray mountains, and all we need to know about his predicament is explained by a small orange-and-white plane, of no marked nationality, that sits nearby, with one of its wings snapped in half. (He eats, sleeps, and takes storm refuge in the body of the plane.)
Arctic (2019)
Directed by: Joe Penna
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thelma Smáradóttir
Screenplay by: Joe Penna, Ryan Morrison
Production Design by: Atli Geir Grétarsson
Cinematography by: Tómas Örn Tómasson
Film Editing by: Ryan Morrison
Costume Design by: Margrét Einarsdóttir
Makeup Department: Ragna Fossberg, Tinna Ingimarsdottir
Music by: Joseph Trapanese
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some bloody images.
Distributed by: Bleecker Street Media
Release Date: February 1, 2019
Visits: 29
