Troll (2022)

Netflix's Troll arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of being anything else. A drilling crew wakes something enormous in the Dovre mountains, and the Norwegian government assembles its finest minds, chief among them a paleontologist named Nora Tidemann, who is competent, female, and never once required to justify her presence. A female prime minister issues the evacuation order. The cast is overwhelmingly Norwegian, with a handful of supporting faces that add texture without commentary. This is representation as furniture: present, functional, unremarked upon. Nobody in the film pauses to congratulate themselves, which is its own small mercy.

The film's most charged gesture is a historical one. Late in the proceedings, a court official explains that Norway's trolls were not legend but a population, wiped out by Christian settlers under King Olaf, their massacre buried in folklore and the Royal Palace planted directly on top of the Troll King's home. It is a satisfying piece of myth-making, the sort of thing that flatters a national audience while remaining safely fantastical. No historian will be losing sleep. The troll itself is less a villain than a bereaved father walking home, and the film grants it a genuine measure of dignity before the sunrise does what sunrise does.

There is no sermon here about carbon or capital, no lecture about the body, no argument about who gets to be seen. The drilling accident is a plot device, not a position paper. What remains is a monster, a church bell that fails, and a tanning-bed trap that works. The film takes its spectacle seriously and its messaging not at all. That restraint is worth something.