What do we do with films that are defiantly strange? Is strangeness justified in art? It seems right to grapple with that question as we come to director Hlynur Pálmason’s film about a Danish priest walking, riding, and staring down miles of frozen ground to build a church in a remote Icelandic village. If strange is a genre, Godland is a genre film.
Strange choices abound in this film. Not many films would juxtapose (A) a voice-over story about a man encountering eels making eerily human female sounds with (B) images of its antihero priest happily bathing under the deluge of a beautiful waterfall. Then we have the central priest character himself. On the one hand he is guilty of callous, uncaring colonialism in the way he goes about coldly trying to bring his version of Christian faith to these rugged lands of Iceland. On the other hand, he is so antisocial and baffling in his behavior that we could suspect he suffers from a mental illness or personality disorder. (MILD SPOILERS TO COME) Then we have that horse, a creature whose fate is so momentous in the narrative yet who is presented to our eyes in the most unexpected and baffling of ways in the second half of the film.
Rather than just making this film a head-scratcher, though, the strangeness is an appropriate companion to what is going on with the characters and the story. This is a film about, among other things, the alienation experienced by the priest as he comes to this new land. In his prayer at the midpoint of the film, we see how isolated he feels even from the faith and mission that he may have supposed he was called to in the early moments of the film. As for isolation and alienation, these are also profoundly true of his forever lack of belonging to the new community to which he is meant to join. He is confused beyond measure by how little of his journey makes sense, and the strangeness of those elements in the film disorients us viewers so we feel a touch of the same alienation he is feeling.
There seems to be much here about the tension between the animal and the spiritual as well as between the flesh and the spiritual. One of the shots near the end of the film is a bit too obvious in the way it evokes the idea of “man is an animal,” and the film could have used more curiosity about who the priest could have been if he had really loved those he had come to serve. Still, the film finds its devastated heart in the character of Ragnar, a man whose final scene in this film is as heartbreaking as it is shocking.
What would have happened if the visiting “man of God” had actually listened to Ragnar and had come to him with the humble heart of Christ? Maybe that wouldn’t have made all the priest’s alienation and confusion vanish, but oh, how the fog would have begun to lift. It may have lifted just enough to reveal some of the beauty of this land and its people.
