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Against the Ice, review: polar-bear attacks, hallucinations and homicidal rage

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Cole in Netflix's Against the Ice - Lilja Jonsdottir
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Cole in Netflix's Against the Ice - Lilja Jonsdottir

Against the Ice is about a Danish expedition in Greenland that cost several years and a number of lives to prove a point: that this region was not, as the USA once tried to contend, separated in two by a strait in its north-east corner, but a single land mass, meaning Denmark could claim sovereignty over the lot of it.

It’s slightly curious to have this tale of historically important flag-planting unfold as an English-language feature – and with a Brit, Joe Cole, in one of the two main roles – but Netflix aren’t likely to complain. There’s a ready audience for this sort of thing, and anyone whose idea of fun is watching bearded blokes in britches get serially attacked by polar bears will be tempted to give Peter Flinth’s film the time of day.

Then again, any such person who already braved The Terror or The North Water, a pair of gruesomely riveting miniseries about Arctic shipping disasters, is liable to find this much less graphic saga ploddingly respectable and ever-so-slightly underwhelming.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish Game of Thrones star who manages a busy bilingual career, co-wrote the script and stars as Ejnar Mikkelsen, the explorer and author who captained the quest in 1909, initially with the aim of recovering an earlier team’s bodies. To brave the final part of the journey, he left his ship, the Alabama, at Shannon Island, and took along just one member of its crew as a wingman: a rookie engineer called Iver Iversen (Cole), who volunteered when all Mikkelsen’s more experienced comrades fell silent.

It was the journey back that really gave them hell. It’s halfway before we get Polar Bear Attack One, an assault on Mikkelsen that’s slickly achieved and definitely kicks the film up a notch: before this point, there’s a hapless husky dangling off a cliff, but what other dramatic tension there is comes from one man beginning to lose his temper at the other’s singing.

Cole, with a wispy ginger beard in his part, has adopted a posh accent that renders Iver something of a goody-two-shoes irritant at times, like the roommate no one wanted at public school. I wouldn’t say that’s a bad choice to lend the character some detail, but results may vary: when he pipes up with one of his ditties, Mikkelsen’s failure to pack noise-cancelling headphones suddenly seems like one of his more fateful mistakes.

The wooden failure of the script to capture a period ring perhaps invites such cheap shots. The two actors are at least doing modestly well to make a touching unit, a pair trying to be kind to each other, when the film goes and makes its biggest blunder: a hallucination involving Mikkelsen’s sweetheart Naja (Heida Reed) flying in from nowhere and arriving at his side.

True, the men have already spent some 793 days solely in each other’s company, after getting back to find the Alabama deserted and a shack built from its planks by their runaway crew-mates, with enough food to last them several years. Mikkelsen wrote in his memoir, Two Against the Ice, about the madness and eventual homicidal rage this cabin fever triggered. But the film would have done much better to bring Naja in by suggestion, not hot air balloon.

She’s ridiculous, and not in a good way. The men insistently chat about missing women in the dreariest manner, even though Iver often seems, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of gay, and the intimacy of their relationship could only have gained something had the ambiguity been sustained there. As it is, Against the Ice is very square, very straight, and just naggingly average in all departments.


101 min. Dir: Peter Flinth. On Netflix now