Godland

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThere are thousands upon thousands of movies released each year. Too many, it could be argued – anyone who has leapt into the bowels of Prime Video will be greeted by an absurd number of new films that no one in their right mind will have seen or even heard of.But sometimes these disappeared movies warrant a look – they’re the equivalent of finding a £10 note down the crack of the…

Like The Eight Mountains (No 11 on this year’s UK list/No 12 on the US list), Godland is predicated on the construction of a haven in the wilderness – this time, a church on the 19th-century Icelandic coast. Unlike its spiritual sibling in the 2023 film lineup, though, nature is no comfort here, rather an Old Testament-like chastisement in waiting for man’s ambition and hubris. There’s a lot more frightening Herzogian immensity and admonishment here than home-on-the-range John Ford cosiness and sentiment. Nor does…

Lucas, the wayfaring Lutheran priest at the centre of the extraordinary Godland, is having a rough time of it. Far from his native Denmark, and charged with building a new parish in the hostile wilds of Iceland, he’s losing his faith and his mind at an equal pace. But that’s par for the course in films about his kind. Few vocations get a worse rap on screen than the man of God, whether it’s forbidden desires or invading demons disrupting his regular business. Played with slowly unravelling composure by a marvellous…

“It’s terribly beautiful,” says a troubled Danish priest in this 19th-century questing tale from Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason, whose previous film A White, White Day was his country’s official submission for the 92nd Academy Awards. “Yes, it’s terrible,” comes the reply, “… and beautiful.” It’s a subtle distinction, but one that lies at the heart of Pálmason’s quietly soul-shaking and wryly satirical epic, a cinematic tone poem that the film-maker describes as being “about inner and outer conflicts”, about…

Harshness is transformed into beauty and then terror by this extraordinary film from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason about a 19th-century Danish pastor sent to establish a new church on Iceland’s remote south-eastern coast. I left the cinema dazed and elated by its artistry; it is breathtaking in its epic scale, magnificent in its comprehension of landscape, piercingly uncomfortable in its human intimacy and severity. There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological…