Ur mörkret (From Darkness)
An intense, gloomy Swedish wander-in-the-woods movie with enough personal losses – children, fingers, relationships, sanity, jobs – for a country and western album.
Park ranger Angelica (Rakel Bener) believes grieving mother Maria (Amanda Kilpelainen Arvidsson) is lost in the forests three days before a joyless Christmas – no one has decorations up – still looking for the body of her son Theo (Lars Adsten) who wandered off from a school trip in a blizzard and was never found. Still feeling guilty that her own crisis, which led to miscarriage, prompted her then-partner, dog-handler Viktor (Oscar Skagerberg), to call off the search for Theo, Angelica rounds up the few volunteers she can find – base camp tent-sitting Aisha (Archanner Khanna) and her more-trouble-than-he’s-worth would-be new boyfriend Johan (Peter Morlin) to venture out in search of the possibly mad woman. Oh, and something unseen is given to attacking fringe characters – and these parts are haunted by a ‘cave wraith’, a spectre unleashed hundreds of years ago by ill-advised ore mining who comes complete with her own mythology of sacrifice, Faustian pacts and looming menace (with a couple of Blair Witch echoes thrown in).
It’s a small story, with damaged folks squabbling while wrapped up in woolly sweaters, hats and gloves – and a thrumm of dread as trudging down the path into the dark woods leads to nastier turns. It does feature a heroic dog, Noah, and a couple of decent revelations en route to a grim-ish last act quandary. Performances are excellent, under what look like very trying circumstances – with Morlin especially good as one of those supporting characters who come along on the trek ostensibly to be helpful (actually because he wants to get with Angelica) but whose every utterance and action serves to make a bad situation much much worse. Written by Jimmy Nivren Olsson; directed by Philip W. da Silva.
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