Arctic (2019)

[baumer]

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[MOVIEGUY]

I highly recommend this. I'm a big fan of survival thrillers and this is probably the best one I've seen since The Grey. It's an incredibly lean movie, the story is told entirely visually, there's barely any dialogue, no monologues, no unnecessary backstory or expository information, it's just Mads Mikkelsen stranded in the arctic trying to survive and I found it utterly compelling for the entire runtime.

Getting into more spoilery stuff and some more thoughts I had on the movie:

Spoiler

 

The story picks up when Mikkelsen's character flags down a rescue helicopter which crashes in a storm while trying to save him. There's one survivor in the crash who he rescues and tries to nurse back to health but is slowly dying, so he sets off from his camp with her to try and get her to an outpost, and endures a number of hardships in doing so. At this point the whole time I was kinda thinking "This is a stupid decision to try and save this dying woman, you're killing yourself trying to save her and she has no hope" but by the end it makes sense and is very uplifting, and the movie wouldn't work otherwise. Honestly the only complaints I had were Mikkelsen's character basically walking off a pretty horrific injury at one point (which is a pretty common trope in survival thrillers in general) and in the previously mentioned helicopter crash another character is killed, which the movie doesn't really make clear so it just kinda seems like Mikkelsen leaves him out to die in the snow.

 

 

But yeah, this is a really exciting, gripping thriller and Mikkelsen is an absolutely tremendous presence with almost no dialogue. It's only 97 minutes and it's streaming for free on Amazon Prime if you have that, so you should definitely check it out.

 

Also a bit of trivia, it's directed by Joe Penna who I was surprised to find out is also MysteryGuitarMan, a guy who's youtube videos I used to watch way back in the day.