“Godland”, which was the Icelandic submission to Best International Film Oscar and then included in the shortlist around the end of the last year, is relentlessly cold, rigid, and bleak from the beginning to the end. I often felt distant to the story and characters due to its glacial narrative pacing and rather thin characterization, but I admired at least how its impressive technical aspects serve well its icy artistic vision on the screen. Yes, this is not exactly something called “entertaining”, but you cannot easily forget its numerous striking visual moments for a long time.

The story, which is mainly set in Iceland during the late 19th century, opens with the conversation between a young Danish priest named Lucas (Elliot Crosset Hove) and his direct supervisor. Lucas is soon going to be sent to Iceland for establishing a church in one remote rural settlement, and he seems quite eager to prove himself there as a man of God. In fact, he decides to travel across the vast wasteland area of Iceland just because he simply wants to know and understand more of Iceland and its people, though, as one character points out later in the story, he could just go directly (and comfortably) to that rural settlement by ship instead.

When he subsequently arrives in one beach area of Iceland, everything seems to be going fairly well for Lucas at first, but we observe more of how unprepared he actually is in many aspects. While the wasteland region of Iceland turns out to be much harsher than he expected, there is also a constant language barrier between him and those local guys hired to help him, mainly because he cannot speak Icelandic that much. One of those local guys, Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), kindly tries to help Lucas as much as possible, but the language barrier between them always remains between them, and this failure to communicate only comes to exacerbate the growing sense of isolation around Lucas.

Among a number of stuffs Lucas brought from Denmark, there is an old big camera he is going to use for recording the land and people of Iceland from time to time. Just like the photographs of his camera, the movie is presented in the film ratio of 1.33:1 coupled with some old-fashioned visual touches, and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff’s camera often sticks to its static position unless it pensively pans across the spaces occupied by the main characters. As they go deeper into the wasteland area of Iceland, the movie gives us a number of overwhelmingly vast and bleak landscape shots to behold, and this further accentuates its hero’s growing emotional turmoil along the story. No matter how much he tries to stick to his faith in God, Lucas finds himself pushed closer and closer to his breaking point, and the mood becomes a bit feverish when something inevitable happens to him in the end.

At that narrative point, the movie jumps forward to its second half, which focuses on how Lucas tries to go on in that rural settlement after going through a recovery period. As receiving some support from many of those local people including a Danish farmer named Carl (Jacob Lohmann), he may be able to settle there as their spiritual leader, but he is still struggling with his doubts and vulnerabilities, and we are not so surprised when he seems interested in getting closer to one of Carl’s two daughters.

In the meantime, we also observe the accumulating tension between Lucas and Ragnar, who sincerely approaches to Lucas for getting any spiritual help but only finds himself coldly rejected. Their mutual animosity becomes all the more palpable to us when they happen to do a bit of wrestling together in the middle of a local wedding party, and that eventually culminates to a somber but undeniably powerful scene where Ragnar phlegmatically confides a lot of personal feelings in front of Lucas.

Around that point, the movie goes for more despair and bleakness, but director/writer Hlynur Pálmason keeps things rolling as before. The finale may be a bit too nihilistic for some of you, but the sheer visual power of the movie continues to hold our attention even though we still observe the story and characters from the distance. There is a stunning moment which chillingly conveys to us how that starkly moody world inhabited by the main character keeps moving on without much care at all just like it has always done for many centuries, and the movie only shows a brief gesture of pity before its very last scene.

The main cast members are solid in their respective parts. While Elliott Crosset Hove dutifully holds the center as required, Jacob Lohmann, Vic Carmen Sonne, and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir are effective in their substantial supporting roles, and the special mention goes to Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, who previously collaborated with Pálmason in “A White, White Day” (2019). Right from his very first scene, Sigurðsson imbues his character with a genuine sense of life and personality, and he naturally steals the scene along with that plucky dog in the film.

On the whole, “Godland” certainly requires some patience from the very start as your average arthouse theater movie, so it may not turn out to be your cup of tea, but I think you should take a chance with it someday. Once you accept what and how it is about, you may appreciate its considerable artistic/technical achievement, and you will probably have some expectation on whatever will come next from its evidently talented director.