Mark Reviews Movies: THE TUNNEL (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 18, 2021

It's a floating plastic bag that causes all of the devastation in The Tunnel, director Pål Øie's effectively tense disaster film. There's more to the disaster than a stray piece of litter, but it just goes to show how one simple, seemingly innocuous thing can start a chain of events that go beyond anyone's comprehension.

Beneath the explosion and fire and smoke of this story, though, is the idea that all of this is within people's comprehension. Some opening text informs us that in Norway, where the story takes place, tunnel safety is a woefully incomplete, ineffective endeavor. Most tunnels in the country, seeing everyday personal and commercial commuters, don't have emergency exits or shelters (As recently as last year, dozens of tunnels were cited for not meeting minimum European safety standards). The official policy is that, if some disaster were to strike within any of these tunnels, it's every person's individual responsibility to escape or survive.

Øie and screenwriter Kjerti Helen Rasmussen aren't here to make a statement. Their film is one of early dread—because there's nothing else we can take from the informative prologue—and constantly mounting obstacles and dangers, with just enough of a human story to make us care about the fates of a select number of characters trapped inside or trying to save people within the tunnel.

Even so, the film does make a pretty strong statement: Norway has failed and continues to do so in terms of the safety of commuters traveling through more than a thousand of the country's tunnels. If this film—inspired by an assortment of true stories—doesn't change things, it hasn't failed in its goal, but it certainly will make the country's infrastructure shortcomings look a lot worse.

It's almost Christmas Day in Norway, on a stretch of road leading to a small, idyllic town, where the biggest travesty is the wind blowing down the local Christmas tree. Stein (Thorbjørn Harr) drives a snowplow, having given up his job as an emergency worker following the illness and death of his wife a few years prior. He has a teenage daughter named Elise (Ylva Fuglerud), who's first seen holding her breath under water (establishing some potential to survive what's about to come), and Stein can't risk her losing both parents. There's a risk he might be losing her in another way, though. Elise isn't happy that her father is dating Ingrid (Lisa Carlehed) and, in her mind, is forgetting her mother.

In terms of characterization, that's all we get before the disaster arrives, but it's enough. We also meet a few other commuters on their way to the tunnel. A pair of truck drivers, one of whom will have that fateful encounter with the plastic bag in the middle of the road, crack a few jokes. A well-to-do man, rushing to get his son to a Christmas pageant, passes the convoy formed by Stein's snowplow, gets stuck in the snow, and is a jerk toward his young boy (later being scolded by an emergency worker for not realizing how lucky he is). One family—a mother, a father, two daughters—is listening to music, laughing, and unaware of what horrors are in store for them.

A truck carrying a fuel tanker crashes after the windshield is blocked by the bag. Traffic stops. Some people try to pass, and even more obstacles form.

Before the real disaster occurs (a fuel leak and a spark from some damaged wiring), Øie establishes the geography of the tunnel quite well. Its two entrances—one of the side of Stein's hometown and the other leading toward Oslo—become vital, as Stein, enlisted by the mayor, and a team of rescue workers become the first to arrive at the scene (On the other side, the station assigned to this tunnel—in another failing of the system—is farther away and blocked by an avalanche). We get an idea of how far the trucks, that family, and a bus carrying Elise to Oslo are into the tunnel. Keeping tabs on the situation from a control room is Andrea (Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes), a dedicated traffic control worker, who is stymied by the absence of cameras inside the tunnel and has to translate what's happening from a series of sensors, which can only tell a partial and sometimes uncertain story.

The action is relatively low-key, in that there's only the one explosion and a late-stage collapse. Most of the threat here comes from the heat and an all-encompassing plume of smoke, which billows out from the entrance on Stein's side, preventing the workers from spending any significant amount of time inside. Trapped, people slowly suffocate. A man is hit by a car speeding blindly toward the exit. Elise tries to start a survival mission, knowing about a mechanical room in the direction of the fire, but she can only convince some to relative safety, ironically, by running toward the most obvious danger.

That relative restraint in terms of spectacle, along with some fine performances that cut through melodrama into fear and trauma, keeps this story grounded in a sense of sometimes-terrifying realism. Øie and cinematographer Sjur Aarthun give a sense of stifling claustrophobia with isolated dimness moving into complete darkness within the smoke-filled tunnel.

At every moment, we understand what's happening, how the situation escalates, and where everyone is. That may seem like the basics, but it goes a long way toward making The Tunnel believable and frightening. The only question we're left with is why such a situation could happen in the first place, but that's for the Norwegian government to ignore at their own peril.

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