Dagmar: L'âme des vikings

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'm not sure I've seen a film as satisfyingly simple as 'Flukt' in years.

The year is 1363. The place is Norway, recently decimated by the bubonic plague. A young girl's family is murdered by a group of roving bandits and the girls is taken hostage. With the help of another young girl within the group of bandits, she escapes and the two girls flee across breathtakingly beautiful Norwegian landscapes with the bandits in close pursuit. This, in a nutshell, is the entire movie.

I'm a fan of simple films. I think the present day trend to blend too many subplots leads to 3 hour, convoluted, bloated stinkers (The Dark Knight and Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you...) but in some ways 'Flukt' was too simple for its own good. I was invested in the wellbeing of the two girls but I never really felt a sense of danger or surprise because the plot played it so safe and trod such predictable ground. You know this is going to turn out okay and even the ways in which the antagonists are dispatched are unfortunately over-telegraphed.

I would have loved to have seen a bit more of an edgy approach to the plot, a few twists and turns that weren't so obvious. But still, it's beautifully shot, beautifully acted, and exciting enough to keep your attention. Also clocking in at only 78 minutes, it's so short that even if you dislike it, you won't feel like you wasted any time.

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).

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.

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.