An opening card announces that a box “was found in Iceland with seven wet plate photographs taken by a Danish priest. These images are the first photographs of the southeast coast. This film is inspired by these photographs.” It is fiction; there were no such photographs. Yet the images taken within this overpoweringly beautiful film – some of them wet plate – contain their own arresting truth.
Godland chronicles the journey of a Danish priest as he is dispatched during the 19th century to his country’s sometime colony of Iceland. From the outset, Hlynur Pálmason’s film strikes the doomy tone of Werner Herzog’s calamitous colonial adventures Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God.
Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), the wretched clergyman, is on a mission to build a church in a far-flung corner of Iceland. He is accompanied by a translator and a surly local guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), as he traverses the inhospitable, alien terrain. Along the way, Lucas insists, against all advice, that the caravan enter the raging river that drowns his translator and carries a giant wooden cross away. It is the first of many arrogant miscalculations.
Pálmason’s contemplative screenplay pitches faith against hypocrisy, weak-mindedness against brute strength, and imperialism against nature. It takes a village to build the church, yet the structure looks metaphorically flimsy. A sexual liaison and a barking dog are enough to threaten the entire institution.
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Lucas, though put-upon, is too self-involved for a true crisis of faith. His country priest, in stark contrast to Robert Bresson’s, is ill equipped for the brutal weather, the language barrier and Ragnar’s taunts.
The director’s glacial pace is exemplified by the reappearance of a dead horse, shot over a period of two years, as the worms start eating the animal. The carcass of the unfortunate beast, ultimately, is grown over.
This is not a film for either thrill seekers or the faint of heart. Gyula Pados, the Hungarian cinematographer known for the Maze Runner sequence and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, frames sublime, daunting tableaux. Elliott Crosset Hove and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson make for compelling adversaries in a wonderful terrible contest.
