Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy sleeping in the corner over there know about. This is the place where we find underappreciated films, foreign and domestic, and we make sense of them, all the way down to the theological gangplank some of them dare you to walk. Today? We are doing a deep dive on Godland, a 2022 Icelandic arthouse film so quietly brutal and so cinematically gorgeous that the fact it ever got made and distributed at all is its own small miracle.
Here is the trailer. Watch it first if you have not seen the film, it gives you a taste of what you are in for without ruining the things worth being ruined by.
Alright. Full spoilers from here out. Everything. You have been warned in the only way that matters, which is plainly and without ceremony. If you have not seen it and you want to go in cold, go watch it and come back. The film is worth that much.
So. Late 19th century. A Danish Lutheran priest named Lucas is dispatched by the church to Iceland, then a Danish territory, to build a parish in a Danish settlement. He brings a camera. Not a small, convenient camera. An enormous, plate-glass, haul-it-by-mule camera that has absolutely no business being dragged across volcanic terrain in deteriorating weather. He brings it anyway. And that camera is the first thing this film tells you about Lucas, before a single word of dialogue, before a single scene of him interacting with another human being. He brought the wrong tool for the landscape he was entering and he would rather break his back and everyone else’s than leave it behind.
Now, before we get into the walkthrough, let me tell you something about what a film like this costs to exist, and I mean that beyond the budget.
A film shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, on location in Iceland, with no recognizable international stars, no franchise hook, no English dialogue, and a runtime that asks you to sit with silence the way most films ask you to sit with explosions, that film gets about fifteen minutes in a traditional acquisitions meeting before somebody asks whether it can be recut to ninety minutes and whether the priest character can be made more sympathetic in act three. Director Hlynur Pálmason has made exactly the film that survives zero rounds of that conversation. The square frame is not an affectation, it is an artistic wonder. The silence is not pacing trouble, it is the argument. You can tell when a film has been shielded from that room, because it still has all its teeth. Godland has all its teeth.
Godland 2022 Movie Walkthrough
Lucas sets out across Iceland accompanied by a group of Icelandic laborers and a translator named Hilmar. The journey goes badly almost immediately, because Lucas makes it go badly. At a deep river crossing, he overrules the guide Ragnar, insists on fording it, and Hilmar drowns. Gone. His one actual line of communication with the people he has been sent to serve, gone, because Lucas decided he knew better than the man who had actually been standing on that land his entire life. After that, Lucas begins a long, slow mental collapse. He falls from his horse, rolls into a ravine, and the men physically carry him the rest of the way to the settlement. He arrives broken and is nursed back to health by a farmer named Carl and his daughters, Anna and Ida.
Carl helps Lucas build the church. The settlement waits. Lucas, in a move that demonstrates either breathtaking arrogance or profound obliviousness, announces he will perform no weddings until the church is fully built. He also develops an obvious attraction to Anna, which Carl watches with the particular quiet patience of a man deciding how long he is willing to wait before he handles something himself.
Meanwhile, Lucas and Ragnar circle each other like two animals who have already decided how this ends but are not yet ready to act on it. When Lucas’ horse goes missing and turns up dead, Lucas confronts Ragnar directly. And Ragnar, in the film’s strangest and most important scene, confesses. Not in the way a man confesses when he is afraid. In the way a man confesses when he has decided he is done carrying something alone and wants to watch what happens when he hands it to someone who was never equipped to hold it.
The confession goes like this, and it is worth quoting in full because the rhythm of it is the whole point:
I once pissed in someone else’s water. Pray for me.
I once laughed at someone who was injured. Pray for me.
I have been selfish, and a coward. Pray for me.
I have dirty thoughts almost all the time. Pray for me.
I have let someone die when I could have saved their life. Pray for me.
I’m full of shit. Pray for me.
I’m afraid of God. Pray for me.
I killed your horse. Pray for me.
The question the film leaves sitting right there, unresolved, is whether Ragnar is messing with Lucas or whether he is genuinely, in his own crude way, seeking absolution. And the film pivots on that question like a door on a single hinge. Because Lucas cannot tell the difference. He was never going to be able to tell the difference. A priest who genuinely understood the people he was serving would recognize a confession when it was happening. Lucas hears theater, or threat, and responds with rage. He kills Ragnar. Flees with Anna. The church gets finished. Everyone shows up for the first service.
Then Ragnar’s dog starts barking in the back of the church.
Lucas steals a horse and runs. Carl catches him in the snow, says something genuinely beautiful about having no ambition toward great knowledge, about realizing that what he thinks is not very important, and then kills Lucas and leaves him in the snow. The film’s final minutes watch Lucas’ body return to the earth. Ida visits his remains and tells him that soon the grass and flowers will grow there, and that he will be in them, and that that will be beautiful.
The film opens with a title card stating it was inspired by real photographs taken on a journey like this one. That is not true. There were no such photographs. The filmmakers made that up. But the film is shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the ratio of a large-format plate camera, the exact kind of camera Lucas hauls across Iceland, and so from the first frame the film has already told you what it is doing. You are not watching a movie. You are looking through Lucas’ camera. You are seeing Iceland the way Lucas chose to frame it, and the irony is that Lucas never actually sees the thing he is pointing his lens at. He photographs the landscape constantly and registers none of it. The frame is gorgeous. The man inside it is going blind.
Godland Movie Explanations and Theories
The competing reads on this film are not complicated, but they are worth laying out cleanly. The first read is the straightforward anti-colonial one. Lucas is a representative of Danish ecclesiastical power arriving in Iceland with the mandate to install a foreign religious infrastructure on people who already have their own relationship with their land and their dead. He fails, he becomes violent, he is absorbed by the landscape he tried to conquer. Iceland wins. The church loses. The end.
The second read uses the Book of Jonah as its spine, and the film basically hands you this reading if you are paying attention to what Lucas is actually doing. Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh, a city he despises, and preach repentance. He refuses, gets eaten by a whale, gets spat out, goes to Nineveh, delivers the most minimal possible sermon, the Ninevites repent anyway, and Jonah’s response is to get furious at God for being merciful to people Jonah did not think deserved mercy. Lucas is doing the same thing in slow motion across two hours of Icelandic volcanic terrain. He was sent to serve these people. He despised them from the moment he arrived. He never intended to actually give them anything. When Ragnar confesses and asks to be prayed for, the correct response for a priest is to pray. Lucas cannot do it. When Ragnar asks how to become a man of God, the correct response for a priest is to tell him. Lucas stonewalls. He is not a priest in Iceland. He is Jonah on the boat, booking passage in the wrong direction, and the whale is already in the water.
The third read, which is the most interior one, is about the camera itself. Lucas is a man who believes that documentation and witness are the same thing. He photographs Iceland because he believes that photographing something is the same as understanding it, or honoring it, or possessing it. The film uses that 1.33:1 frame to put you inside that delusion with him. And then it kills him and has Ida tell his bones that the flowers will grow through them. No photograph survives. No church survives. The land survives.
Moviesoapbox Preferred Reading of the Movie Godland 2022
My read is the second one, and I will tell you why without hedging. The Jonah parallel is too precise to be accidental and too structurally central to be decorative. Pálmason is making a film about a man who was given a genuine spiritual assignment and spent his entire energy avoiding it, and the twist is that the assignment kept trying to complete itself through him anyway. Ragnar’s confession is real. It has to be real. A man messing with a priest does not end his list with “I killed your horse, pray for me.” That is a man who wants to be forgiven, by the only person in the territory who is supposed to have that authority, and Lucas cannot do it because Lucas does not actually believe in the thing he was sent to represent. He believes in his own authority. He believes in the hierarchy that sent him. He does not believe in grace, because grace would require him to extend it to people he has already decided are beneath him, and that he cannot do.
Carl kills him for the same reason Iceland absorbs him at the end. He was here and then he was gone and the land did not notice.
Godland is the kind of film that factory Hollywood cannot make and would not distribute if someone handed it to them finished. Square frame, no stars, subtitles, two hours, theological argument embedded in landscape photography, no resolution that satisfies anyone looking for one. It exists because a filmmaker in Iceland decided it needed to exist and found the resources to make it happen without a single VP note in sight. That is not a small thing. Most films like this get notes. Most films like this come out of that process with a sympathetic priest, a redemptive ending, maybe a scene where Lucas actually connects with Anna in a way that gives you something to root for in act three. The version you watched has none of that. The version you watched lets him die in the snow and calls it beautiful. That is the version worth watching.
What are your thoughts about Ragnar? Is he Jonah? The whale?