From the sublime to the ridiculous: Godland reviewed

Godland is a film to see on the big screen: not just for its awesome, immersive cinematography, but because it is so remorselessly bleak that if you’re watching it at home you are likely to give up. To get the most out of it you need to be trapped.

Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), an upright, serious, bearded young Lutheran priest in late 19th-century Denmark, is being sent to Iceland as a missionary. ‘Lucas, you must adapt,’ his red-faced bishop (Waage Sando) tells him while munching through a lavish lunch of chicken and boiled eggs. ‘At times your task will seem monumental.’ The Icelandic weather is forbidding, the bishop explains; in the perpetual summer sunlight people forget to sleep. A volcano has recently gone off whose ‘smell can be so overwhelming that people lose their minds’. The young priest sits there, not eating a morsel. The viewer reflects that the running time is 143 minutes.

 On disembarking, Lucas meets his guide through the wilderness: Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a weatherbeaten atheist curmudgeon who refuses to speak Danish. He slightly reminded me of the only Icelandic tour guide I have encountered, who shepherded our group towards a ravine and then announced: ‘If you go on the other side of the rope, you will die.’ By the time we had discovered how flimsy the rope was and how slippery the path was, he had disappeared round the corner for a fag break.

So I could feel some extra sympathy with Lucas, Ragnar and their little party as they trudge over miles of jagged mountain and spongy, rain-saturated moss, occasionally pausing to gather round the fire and listen to an unsurpassably creepy story about a traveller whose life is ruined after he stumbles on an evil population of eels.