Godland

Like all the best movies, we can’t tell where this is going. When it arrives, the finale is worthy of all that has come before. Nobody makes movies like this any more -- except that some do.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more immersive Winter Wonderland experience than Godland.

It's an unforgettable movie yet one whose meanings seem to lie just beyond reach, and it marks the arrival of a new filmmaker whose roots tap into something unfathomably old.

The film is an effectively somber, despairing meditation on faith, vanity, and colonialism. While much of his film is austere, Pálmason employs a few flashy techniques to enhance the eerie mood of existential unease.

[Leaves] the viewer with a sense of being engulfed by a landscape in which cultures collide – the incarnate and the infinite forever butting heads, neither willing to concede hard-won ground.

The paltry comforts of organised religion in the face of nature is the subject of this spectacular epic...

Hove portrays the priest who loses his faith from the isolation and his inability to communicate with the locals. The landscape and Maria von Hausswolff's cinematography bring those qualities home.

[A transfixing] meditation on the lingering impact of colonialism on the people of Iceland.

Set in the harsh climes of 19th-century Iceland, writer-director Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland is a flinty yet majestic drama of colonial arrogance, faith, human frailty and photography.

While I appreciate Pálmason’s scope and ambition and admire his austere and contemplative style, I found the experience to be more of a slog than the transfixing epic it should have been.