Flukt

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.

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).

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.

Flawlessly crafted and acted. Each of the characters engages your interest, even the evil ones some sympathy as one senses their back stories. The landscapes scenes transcend the clichés of "beautiful nature" and reveal it as sometimes magnificent, sometimes dangerous, and often simply what nature at the end of the day is; a universe we did not make that is neither for nor against us.

The story line has been done many times, but there is a freshness in this film, an immediacy, and a sense of deft actuality that places you there. Nothing is wasted, nothing is overdone, and with each shot the characters reveal not the standard villains of the era, but merely people caught up in the after effects of the Black Plague's having ravaged the stability of Europe.

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.