Mark Reviews Movies: ARCTIC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 7, 2019

A man is stuck alone in the middle of nowhere and must struggle against nature in order to survive. The story of Arctic is a familiar one. It has been done before in movies with different backdrops than this one—obviously, somewhere in the snowy fields and mountains of the Earth's polar north. Such tales offer plenty of hardships with the singular hope that a human being is capable of doing much more than he or she might expect in order to survive.

Director Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison's screenplay follows through on those expectations, but more importantly, it throws a significantly different element into the mix. That element seems as if it would against the philosophy of one man's survival in the wild but, because of the circumstances, doesn't. With that addition, the film becomes more than a tale of adversity under a seemingly impossible situation. It becomes a study of whether or not a person is willing to give up his humanity in order to survive.

The man is Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen), who has been stranded in the middle of freezing nowhere for a number of days that's intentionally difficult to determine. On a map of the area, he marks down each day, but the markings are scattered around the paper. This seems like a smart strategy, especially with no rescue in sight. To have the time kept is a necessity, if only so that someone down the line might know how long he lasted. To be able to so easily read how much time has passed, though, might just be the thing that deflates a person's hope.

We learn very little about this man, except that he speaks English and Danish, possesses some considerable amount of resourcefulness, and has been stuck here long enough to know that he needs reliable shelter and a steady supply of food. The shelter is the airplane that crashed and put him in this precarious situation. The food is a collection of fish, caught with a series of poles stuck into the frozen ground and lines dropped through the ice into water beneath.

There are two more details that seem slightly important. The first is that he wasn't alone at one point. Nearby, there's a pile of rocks that he visits as part of his routine, which is kept on schedule by the intermittent beeping of an alarm on his wristwatch. It's the grave marker of someone who either died in the crash or sometime after. The second detail is that he was part of a flight crew, which at least suggests why he some basic medical training and that there's a life before this time—one to which he hopes to get back.

Otherwise, Penna and Morrison offer no substantial details about Overgård's past—what he did beyond his job, what he was like, what family he may have. Such mystery is almost a requirement for stories such as this one, because the point is that nothing else matters beyond the here and now. It can put a damper on the storytelling, because we're given no reason to care for the protagonist beyond the fact that it's a person, and in terms of drama, it usually means that everything is ultimately static. We simply watch as someone whom we don't know faces obstacle after obstacle, finding some way to overcome them and figure out a way save himself or herself.

There's a scene here, though, in which Penna and Morrison overcome those potential narrative pitfalls. Near the end of the first act, after establishing the despair of the circumstances and Overgård's routine, our protagonist hears the distinct whirring of a helicopter. He rushes toward the sound, spots it in the distance, and releases some smoke from a signaling device. Trying to land in the harsh wind, the helicopter crashes.

Even before we're introduced to a new player in this isolated drama, there's a moment that suggests the soon-to-be constant dilemma of Overgård's newly adapted situation. He stares at the wreckage of the aircraft, both in shock and almost as if he's doing some calculation in his head. Is it worth going the helicopter?

After a beat, he does and finds the pilot dead but the co-pilot (played by Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) still alive—injured and unconscious but alive, nonetheless. He brings her back to his shelter on a makeshift sled (He chuckles when, later, he discovers an actual sled in the back of the chopper, because what else is there to do?), tends to her wound, and tries to comfort her and keep her alive.

The rest of the story, which sees Overgård trekking toward a facility with the woman in tow, now has a vital and character-defining element to this man's survival. It's no longer simply about him waiting for rescue. It's about him trying to save someone else.

Penna and Morrison don't make it as simple as that, though, because with another person, incapable of walking on her own, comes a new slew of difficulties and dilemmas. Overgård is slower than he would be on his own. The terrain makes it difficult—and, at one point, impossible—for him to take the direct route. The story becomes a series of in-the-moment decisions, in which Overgård must do the troubling arithmetic: Is this stranger's life worth the increasing risk to his own?

Arctic, then, becomes less about the particulars of survival (although there are many more troubles, from a storm to a polar bear) and more about the ethics of it. That makes it especially harrowing, as the film's ultimate questions aren't about what one person can do to survive. They're whether it's right to live a bit longer on one's own or, almost certainly, to die together.

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