GODLAND ★★★★½
|(M) 143 minutes
Godland is inspired by a box of seven photographs made in the 19th century, the first ever taken of the southeast coast of Iceland – except that they never existed. The writer and director Hlynur Palmason invented them, then based his film on the idea they had existed. He makes us believe they did to entice us into the film’s icy reality.
Who took these fictional photographs? And what became of the photographer? Godland is the bone-chilling, eye-dazzling, heart-wrenching response to those questions – and one of the best films of the year.
Elliott Crosset Hove plays a priest trying to make sense of a hostile land.Credit: Palace Films
It is both an epic saga of landscape cinema and a terrifying philosophical voyage. If God exists, why would he send a young fool like Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) to do his bidding?
Pastor Lucas is full of a desire to save souls in this godforsaken corner of Denmark’s empire, but under-equipped for the task. He is rigid, arrogant and pious – a bad combination.
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His experience of life has come largely from books and his rampant self-regard. In short, he is like a lot of the young priests who went out to the colonies during Christianity’s messianic missionary phase, where they often foundered.
He wants to do it the hard way, by sailing to the west coast and walking across country so that he can “get to know it”. An old priest warns him that it will not be easy. These people are different, you will have to adapt, you will need the strength of an apostle to succeed.
Lucas packs up his photographic apparatus and sets sail. He will take portraits as he goes, for which he has to carry heavy equipment. Just getting ashore exhausts him. On a windswept beach, his guide awaits – the gruff and sceptical Ragnar, a middle-aged man with a face like an Easter Island statue (the superb Ingvar Sigurdsson).
