Dagmar - L'anima dei vichinghi

I stumbled across this little gem on Amazon Instant Video and was persuaded to watch it by the numerous good reviews. I'm so glad that I did because it is a great little film – using a combination of gritty visuals, great acting and the stark but beautiful landscape of the Norwegian mountains to tell a simple but gripping tale. The pacing is great and the way that the characters are fleshed out (for the most part) is pretty well done – although there are a few unanswered questions about how the gang of robbers came to come together. The writers also did a good job of making the story harrowing but not dwelling too much on the suffering of individual characters. There's some blood – but it's not excessive and the potential sexual element (as is natural for a story about a young girl kidnapped by a bunch of depraved bandits) is an ever-present threat but never strays into exploitation territory.

This certainly deserves a LOT better than the 6/10 rating it currently has on IMDb!

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.

Well, after watching this movie yesterday (being shown for only 3 days, no surprise) I was not left with any good feelings, whatsoever. Frankly, the only thing making me rate it 5/10 is that it has some good, high quality shots of the Norwegian nature. I didn't find it particularly thrilling, and I could barely keep track of the movie, as it was so unilateral. The movie starts too slow, and ends too fast. I will not spoil either, but everyone in that cinema knew how the movie was going to develop. If you are Norwegian, and you just want to watch it, because it's Norwegian, that's the only valid excuse there is for watching this movie.

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.

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).