Iceland became an independent country only at the end of World War II. For the longest time in history, this isolated island in the Atlantic Ocean, located almost halfway between Europe and North America, was under the administration of Denmark. Over the centuries, the Danes tried to colonize that exotic and quite deserted island, the size of two Croatias, where about 360 thousand inhabitants live, and just as it is usually the case that the colonizers look at those they colonize as inferior beings, we see that this was the case and in the case of Denmark and Iceland. The ties between Iceland and Denmark are still quite strong, so the Icelandic filmmaker Hylnur Palmason studied in Denmark, where in 2017 he shot his first film, the surrealist drama “Winter Brothers”, and then shot the next film in Iceland, a dark drama – a revenge thriller. “A White, White Day”.
Therefore, it is not surprising that his third film was not only filmed in an Icelandic-Danish co-production, but this story, which takes place at the end of the 19th century in Iceland, is told from the perspective of a Dane. That Dane is the young Lutheran priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove, who had one of the first major roles in Palmason’s “Winter Brothers”), and he was assigned to travel to Iceland to build a church in a settlement built by the Danes. Lucas will take a camera with him to record what he sees on the way, the land, people and all natural phenomena, and in order to get to know the country he is coming to as well as possible, he will decide to cross it by land.
Of course, he will come from Denmark to Iceland by boat, but he will not disembark exactly at the location where the church is to be built, but at the other end of the island and with the assistance of the local guide Ragnar (probably the most famous Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson, who played the main role in White, White Day) he will try to reach the settlement. However, nothing will be able to prepare him for what will await him in Iceland. Lucas knew that he was traveling to a country that was completely different from his own, but he was only going to feel on his own skin how cold, desolate and inaccessible it is to people who don’t really like the Danish bosses. Although Ragnar understands and can speak Danish, this stubborn old man refuses to communicate with Lucas in Danish, and animosity and enmity soon develop between the two.
And in the first fascinating part of “God’s Country”, we follow the journey of Lucas and his caravan from one side of Iceland in late autumn and early winter. And in those moments, it acts almost like an observational documentary on the trail of what the Russian Viktor Kosakovski filmed about natural phenomena. This harsh, mystical, cruel nature will completely enslave the young priest and cause him to be in awe, and the journey through the wilderness and wasteland will prove to be much more dangerous and cruel than what Lucas could have imagined. All this dark atmosphere is additionally enhanced by the cold, gloomy, almost ominous atonal music of Taiwanese-Canadian musician Alex Zhang Hungtai, and it goes without saying that the atmosphere, as well as Marie von Hausswolff’s photography, are impressive.
Those Icelandic wastelands play an important role in the first part of the film as Lucas marvels at everything around him. Those marshy wastelands, volcanoes from which smoke is billowing somewhere in the distance, canyons, cold rivers and everything that surrounds it. After barely surviving this grueling journey, Lucas and the rest of the expedition will arrive in a Danish settlement where Carl (Jacob Lohmann) lives with two daughters, a little girl Ida and a beautiful, young 20-year-old Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne). There, after Lucas recovers, he will fight some other battles, primarily moral ones and with himself, because it will be clear from the beginning that he is attracted to Anna and that the trip to that cruel island, during which he almost died, completely changed him. And it’s a shame that the second part of the film is significantly weaker than the first, and that “Godland” is perhaps a bit too long (138 minutes) and later suffers a lot in terms of pace and rhythm. And while visually, in this fascination with nature, Palmason obviously found a role model in the work of Werner Herzog, according to the existentialist and moralistic struggle of the main character, “Godland” seems to owe a lot to the legendary French filmmaker Robert Bresson and his work. “Godland” premiered in Cannes, and Crosset Hove was nominated for European actor of the year.