Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) (Patreon)

A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that it was inspired by a set of late-19th century silver collodion plates. Alas, Godland is very clearly a film organized by the logic of still photography, since Pálmason's stock-still cinematography and fixation on landscape give the whole affair the stodgy feel of a well appointed coffee-table-book. After producing two smart, well-wrought entertainments -- Winter Brothers and A White, White Day -- Hlynur Pálmason takes a big swing, crafting what clearly aims to be a definitive statement about intra-Scandinavian colonialism, the "civilizing" project of Christian modernism, and of course, the vast and often unforgiving Icelandic landscape. Godland doesn't wear its ambition lightly, which makes it that much more frustrating that Pálmason's film is thematically obvious and dramatically inert. 

In its broad strokes, Godland is a lot like Lucrecia Martel's Zama, but without one iota of humor of self-consciousness. Lucas (Elliott Crossett Hove) is a young Danish priest charged with establishing a church in one of the northernmost points in Iceland, and in the film's first 90 minutes, Pálmason shows us Lucas's arduous trek in treacherous conditions that almost get him killed. Much to Lucas's chagrin, he is reliant on an Icelandic guide, Ragnar (Ingvar E. Sigurðsson), a hard-bitten rustic man whose practical know-how is the exact opposite of Lucas's helplessness. Ragnar mostly finds the priest comically annoying, as when, during the church construction where Lucas is the only man not swinging a hammer, he sarcastically asks the priest, "how do I become a man of god?"

But Lucas' simmering resentment is real, and soon leads to one of the only moments in Godland that could reasonably be called an "incident." Most of the time, Pálmason adopts the wide-eyed, fetishistic viewpoint of Lucas himself, besotted with the beauty of Iceland but bemused by its craggy rural denizens. The center-periphery politics is front and center, and once we see that Lucas stubbornly refuses to insinuate himself into the community, there's not much left to do but wait for him, and Godland, to unravel.

When Godland played in Un Certain Regard last year at Cannes, several critics were nonplussed that it didn't win any of the UCR prizes. Some even thought it belonged in competition, although -- let's be honest -- the stately but conventional, landscape-as-destiny slot was already taken by The Eight Mountains. And while Pálmason has indeed produced something sturdy and classical, much like the work of Jan Troell. But some filmmakers are just more temperamentally suited to genre work, and Godland feels very much like a "big statement" film with very little to say.