"It's Terribly Beautiful"

Hlynur Pálmason's Godland

It was refreshing to watch Godland so soon after Oppenheimer. The latter is possessed of certitude – Nolan has the meaning of the physicist all worked out, it seems – whereas the former dwells in profound mysteries.

I’ve written the following fairly broadly, as to avoid spoilers, but perhaps not broadly enough – so if you’re planning on watching this extraordinary film, perhaps best to return to this piece after you have.

It’s the late 19^th century. An arrogant, fanatically solemn Danish priest – a Lutheran whose piety and self-possession have been forged in books and cosy seminaries – is tasked with founding a church within a tiny, remote Icelandic community whose villagers’ temperaments are forged by earthier things. Iceland was under Danish rule at the time, but was a very different place, and before his voyage, an older priest warns Lucas that the journey will be difficult, and that he’ll need the strength and wisdom of the Apostles to succeed. He adds: “You must adapt to the circumstances of the country and its people”.

But Lucas does not, cannot. The Icelanders seem heretical and alien to him, and his condescension of them devolves into fearful bewilderment. This devolution is in part accelerated by the hardships of the voyage, which Lucas has perversely made more difficult by rejecting a simpler journey by boat in favour of a perilous trek across the country’s brutal hinterlands.  

One reason for this is Lucas’s insistence that it will help him understand the strange people of Iceland, even if it has the effect of exposing them to danger – and even if Lucas, beyond taking their photos, has shown scant interest in them.

Lucas is also a photographer, and the journey by foot and by horse will allow him to take photographs as part of his own, self-imposed sociological survey. This project is subtly but multiply comedic: that it compels his painful hauling of the cumbersome kit; that the journey is made across uninhabited land; and that while Lucas may wish to document Icelanders as a photographer, he possesses no interest or curiosity about them as a man. The chilling remoteness of Iceland meets, indifferently, the chilling remoteness of its visiting priest.   

There seems to be little of Christ in Lucas, but he does contain the superiority of the Church, and while he brings a translator with him, there is still much that’s fatefully lost in translation with his local helpers.  

His chief guide is Ragnar, an older, formidably gnarled man of profound skills developed from necessity. He is a hunter, fisherman, butcher, horseman, carpenter, musician – a ruggedly practical man in contrast to Lucas – but who cannot win any respect from the priest. The feeling is mutual. Ragnar smoulders with his own contempt, violence and fear.

For a time enchanted, then battered and frightened by the land, Lucas wonders why God’s creation – the land, the people – seems so Godless. Why is the sacred mission of spreading His word, and building His house, so hard? In one moment of exhaustion and bitterness, Lucas comes to see the place as undeserving of Him. He tells God: “You do not need to be here.”  

But God is silent.

Lucas’s first sermon in the new church, to which the local villagers have dutifully flocked, is marred by the screaming of a baby, which excites the barking of a dog. It’s marred by life, in other words, but it’s an intolerable blasphemy to the uptight Lucas, who leaves the church to quieten the dog and slips in the mud. This messy pratfall is the least of his humiliations, though – his naïve journey proves to be a crucible which exposes his own deep, spiritual faultlines.

This is one of the best films I’ve seen in a decade. Curiously, another that qualifies is also about a haunted priest – Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. In that film, the troubled priest (Ethan Hawke) finds succour in the words of Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk. Merton once wrote:   

“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.”

In Godland, Lucas encounters despair, but salvation eludes him, and he retreats instead to the very different luxury of his own arrogance.

The film is astonishingly shot, an aria to the country’s brutal beauty. The camera is very slow and very patient, capturing the expanses of the lowlands, the ancient cliff faces, the vast, burbling rivers of lava. There is an exquisitely sensual shot of a man’s bare feet sinking into the lush sponginess of moss. This might seem trivial, but in the context of the film feels almost revelatory.  

The cinematography is central to the success of Godland, given that much of it concerns the relationship between this unyielding land and the people it shapes. The camera must capture both the land’s grandeur and its spooky, implacable ferocity. And it does. “It’s terribly beautiful,” Lucas says of the country to one of the villagers. “Yes,” she replies. “It’s terrible and beautiful.”