Escape

The Norwegian landscape gets put to its proper use in "Flukt", where it's ancient look makes it easy to believe that what you are watching is taking place in the middle ages.

The two girls playing the leads do a great job portraying scared, but level headed, girls. The "grown-ups" did a good job too, but some of these characters were reduced to mindless goons. The movie is quite short on dialog, and some of it was pretty bad. Enough was said to keep the story going, but a little more would maybe added some (needed) depth to some of the characters.

I guess you could say the plot is a series of close calls (but which action movie isn't?), and the movie sometimes takes some shortcuts for simplicity. Especially one sequence in the end would have gone down much differently if just any of the characters had said something.

While the locations used for filming were really good, it was sometimes hard to feel that they connected with each other, and because they were so different (rocks, forests, mountains, plains) it was sometimes hard to place them right next to each other (even though they very well could have been).

Although I enjoyed the director's first movie, Cold Prey, I didn't expect to like Escape as much as I did. Set in medieval Norway, it's a bleak, atmospheric and thrilling movie with great acting (from the first-time child actors as well), great cinematography, and an eerie soundtrack that fits perfectly.

Its story about a girl escaping from a camp and being hunted by her captors is simple and not too original (it reminds me a bit of Apocalypto, which I'm sure wasn't the first to do this either), but it's executed so well that didn't bother me at all. If you're into movies like Black Death and Evil Rising (Sauna), you're definitely going to want to check this one out.

Incredible filming, with typical Norwegian woods and landscape. The directors and clippers know what they are doing. Great music score, and a good story. Composer and writer know what they are doing.

But as a Norwegian who understands the language, I wonder what happened to the actors. This movie brings me right back to the movies made in Norway during the 70-ies and 80-ies, when they brought stage actors to the movie screen. No sentence uttered in this movie, from any character, comes out naturally. It's like it was played on a stage, not on the screen.

I really wish I had seen this movie without understanding the dialog, then it would have been great.

For some reason this is on prime video but has no subtitles. I think it's Norwegian. Even without subtitles you understand 90% of what's going on. The acting is very good, amazing cinematography and I mean truly amazing. If you're bored just give it a try.

I am extremely surprised by the low scores of this good movie in IMDb. I never heard of it until today. Watched it without expectations but without preconceptions as well. Big surprise, this movie was well-timed, didn't lose time with unnecessary dialogs, didn't stretch situations. It is plain, you live or you die. Acting was remarkably good, photography and cinematography impeccable. The most important: was entertaining, and very engaging (you side-up immediately with the good ones and want the bad ones to die, because they are good actors, the really make you believe they are bad, bad people). In less than an hour and a half, you have a good movie, a good story well told. I wonder why the hobbit needs 9 hours to be told... (yes that was sarcasm). Watch Flukt, it is a very good movie.