We join the film as Emily, a competitive ice skater, wakes up on a lump of ice that has apparently broken off from a shelf in a remote Arctic location. She and her teammates had retreated there to practice away from the public eye. The ice she is stranded on is roughly a 20-foot square, adrift in the Arctic Ocean.
With nobody in sight, we occasionally spend time with rescue crews who eventually appear to give up. Emily has little with her: her skates, a small bag of supplies including a first-aid kit, a mobile phone with a smashed screen, a tent and an urn containing her sister’s ashes. We stay with her for the duration, watching her put basic survival skills to work, though she inevitably becomes dehydrated and exhausted.
There is an interesting encounter with a hungry polar bear and her cub, which Emily survives - somewhat ludicrously - by zipping herself into her tent and closing her eyes! The bears, incidentally, are very poorly rendered CGI. Later, her phone rings - she can answer calls but cannot make them - and despite being in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, she miraculously has a signal. This is where we begin to question what is real and what is hallucinated due to her deteriorating state.
Harry, the man on the phone, is initially a cold-caller trying to sell air conditioning. When he calls back, their conversation shifts to life, love, death and the universe - further making me wonder what is real and what's not. Regardless of the call's reality, it provides Emily with the encouragement to keep fighting. We see flashbacks regarding her sister, who, at seven years old, appears to have been struck by lightning due to eight-year-old Emily’s neglect. Carrying that guilt ever since, Emily has been searching for the most beautiful place in the world to scatter the ashes. As the Northern Lights appear, she decides she has found it and finally lets go.
The production is clearly low-budget. The ice platform is strangely static amidst a rough sea that mostly looks like a CGI creation. The water resembles a studio tank rather than a real location - certainly not the genuine waters of Finland. The ending, which I won’t spoil here, is wildly open to interpretation, again forcing us to question the reality of the situation.
At one point, Harry mentions a news item claiming her body has been found. Is she dead? Is Harry real? Is she hallucinating? Or is a miraculous rescue mission around the corner? The film is intentionally ambiguous, leaning into the message rather than the plot, which is full of holes. Ultimately, it seems to be a metaphor for Emily 'drifting' through her own guilt and grief.
Emily herself looks like a high-end video game character half the time, likely due to the use of AI-enhanced digital doubles to save costs. She also appears to survive against all odds - in reality, she would last mere minutes in those waters. At one point, she even dons her skimpy ice-skating gear and barely loses colour! Biological survival is clearly off the table here, so we must consider the survival as purely metaphorical.
It's a decent-enough watch - fairly short at under 90 minutes and moving at times (unlike her ice floe)! Digitally enhanced or not, Thea Sofie Loch Næss delivers a convincing lead performance. It’s currently streaming on Apple TV if you fancy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment