Troll. M. 102 minutes. Four stars.
Marvel fans might think they're intimately familiar with their Norse mythology what with Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston making Thor and Loki such sexy contemporary superheroes, but Roar Uthaug's new monster film harvests really old-school Scandi folklore to come up with a disaster film that's cinematic in scale, even if funded by and meant to be seen on Netflix.
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Roar Uthaug, such a great onomatopoeic-sounding name, is the Norwegian director of the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot starring Alicia Vikander, and before that a terrific Scandi disaster film, The Wave.
Like The Wave, he sets his new film at home, with an ancient power returning from the mythological era to wreak havoc, like Godzilla rising from the ocean to mess up the streets of Tokyo.
He's adding to the Kaiju giant monster film genre with the creature joining the likes of King Kong and Mothra.
As the film opens, a young Nora and her father are rock climbing in a mountainous region the fairy stories say is the home to trolls.
When Nora says she can't see any trolls, her father says it's because she's looking with her eyes and not with her heart, and slowly, slumbering giants appear within the cliff walls.
Years later, an adult Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) is a paleontologist leading a team digging up Norway's ancient past when an exciting discovery she is working on is interrupted by a team from the Norwegian government needing her immediate assistance on a matter of important national security.
At an underground excavation site, an explosion has unearthed some large unknown thing, and Nora has been brought in to join a government think tank advising Norwegian Prime Minister Moberg (Anneke von der Lippe).
Nora identifies the thing as a troll, and while the PM's adviser Andreas (Kim Falk) supports her, many around the table of military figures and heavy-hitters think Nora is a crank.
Nora calls on her father Tobias (Gard B Eidsvold), a disgruntled mythologian academic who is only recently out of a psychiatric institution for his affirmations that trolls are real things and not just fairy tales.
Sent out into the field, Nora and her group of compatriots, which also includes the military specialist Captain Kristoffer Holm (Mads Sjogard Pettersen) get visual confirmation that this beast tearing apart villages outside of Oslo is in fact a real-life mythological troll, awakened after millennia of slumber.
The troll is on its way to the centre of Oslo.
Nora and her team have a race against time.
They have to convince the Prime Minister and her team this is a sentient creature that deserves compassion and not a violent military solution.
As with other films in this monster genre, it's us, mankind, who are the real monsters.
Uthaug builds great empathy for his monster, suddenly awakened after millennia of slumber to find us polluting and digging up his homeland.
The CGI and special effects in this film are terrific, and the troll brought back so many childhood memories of the European creatures imagined by illustrator Rien Poortvliet.
The screenplay from Uthaug and Espen Aukan plays out the expected tropes of every monster/disaster film, particularly the annoying cadre of people in power determined not to believe the plucky expert/hero.
If you're tired of that trope, then you're going to be frustrated by this film.
But adding heft to their monster movie is its allegory relating to contemporary issues of xenophobia and the displacement that Christianity slashed through ancient Europe and its ongoing impact.
Just before Christmas, Netflix released the figures for this new streaming release.
With 128 million hours viewed this was their most popular non-English title.
While it still has many hundreds of millions more viewings to come before it is anywhere near the success of Squid Game, that's definitely enough eyeballs for us to look forward to a Troll 2 for next Christmas.
