Arctic (2018)

Joe Penna's Arctic, from 2018, is a survival drama in which Mads Mikkelsen plays a stranded pilot named Overgård who spends most of the running time dragging a comatose woman across Icelandic snow. A hand-cranked dynamo and a dwindling supply of raw fish mark the passage of his days. The film is nearly wordless. Its dialogue amounts to a few grunts, one screamed plea, and the sound of breath fogging inside a parka. As a study in endurance it is precise and unrelenting, and Mikkelsen carries the whole thing on physical commitment alone.

The cast is predominantly white, which is unremarkable for an Icelandic-American co-production working with the faces available to it. A single Indigenous actor, Tintrinai Thikhasuk, appears as the helicopter pilot. The film makes no comment on this. He is a man in a helicopter who dies in a crash, and the narrative offers no annotation, no gesture toward inclusion, no speech about who he is or where he comes from. It has other concerns: frostbite, crevasses, a polar bear with an interest in the protagonist's dinner.

The young woman, played by María Thelma Smáradóttir, never speaks and never wakes. She is a sled-bound plot device, and the film does not pretend otherwise. There is no gender politics here, no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no historical argument. The Arctic functions as a weather condition, not a cause. The film's most ideological act is the suggestion that a man should not abandon an injured stranger, which registers as a reflex instead of a platform. The film offers craft, cold and quiet and almost entirely free of instruction, and we may classify it accordingly.