Review: Thale (2012)
Cast: Silje Reinåmo, Erlend Nervold, Jon Sigve Skard
Director: Aleksandr Nordaas
Country: Norway
Genre: Fantasy | Horror | Mystery | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Thale opens in limited release on Friday, April 5th. If you’ve already seen the film we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.
It begins with a scream. There’s an immediate terror to Alexsandr Nordaas’ Thale as the camera sharply focuses on the spool of a cassette tape calmly winding, the sound it plays switching from placid dialogue to horrifying shrieks without a moment’s notice. It’s somehow all the eerier for the unaltered pace of the machinery, this aural horror unfolding as its visible surroundings progress unhindered. It’s a fitting shot on which to open a film that peels back the layers on the latent darkness of the world, filtering its look at the inherent evil of nature through the story of two crime scene cleaners who, in the midst of a particularly tricky job in a rural forest, encounter a mute girl who seems not entirely human.
Nordaas establishes this duo in a healthily amusing context, crafting their relationship and the diametric differences between them as a comic foil against which to balance the horror to follow.
There’s almost a touch of Jörg Buttgereit—albeit, of course, in a far milder sense—to the film’s opening scenes, the gruesome gore of the crime scene cleaners’ lives unflinchingly portrayed. Fortunately neither opts to harvest a corpse as a sexual plaything; one, in fact, so struggles to deal with this proximity to death that he can’t help but throw up. Nordaas establishes this duo in a healthily amusing context, crafting their relationship and the diametric differences between them as a comic foil against which to balance the horror to follow. Erlend Nervold and Jon Sigve Skard enact the relationship remarkably well; both relatively inexperienced actors, they manage a natural repartee that—together with the wry wit of Nordaas’ script—defines this as the archetypal slacker bromance.
Aptly conjured though it is, this mild comedy is nought but a foundation of normality upon which Nordaas lays his strangely twisted horror tale. Working from a miniscule budget, he relies solely on atmospherics to make his fear felt, his cramped camerawork and the evocative Norwegian folk soundtrack the key weapons at his disposal. The closed quarters of the setting—the film scarcely leaves the tiny hut in which its characters encounter this creature—create an uncomfortably intimate sensation of proximity to this strange being, her uncanny oddity inciting the film’s key exploration of the good-evil duality. It’s the tension of the scenario that helps make so effective what few jump scares Nordaas elects to incorporate; he is decidedly reserved with his implementation of explicit horror tropes, making all the more impactful those select times wherein he delves fully into the form of the genre.
There’s a valid comparison to be made to 2011’s Troll Hunter in the way Norwegian folklore is evoked and revamped to suit underlying thematic concerns; where André Øvredal used his titular beings as conduits to a sly satire on government procedure, Nordaas tailors his representation of the huldra—as the mysterious woman may or may not be—to an intriguing treatise on evolution, and a frank investigation into evil as an inherent concept.
Labels largely fail Thale; horror is the closest descriptor to the film’s effect, yet even that tag misstates its magic realist qualities. The aforementioned slacker stereotype is a large part of Nordaas’ rooting of this narrative in the real world, offering a recognisable anchor around which his more fantastical plot elements can be cautiously deployed. There’s a valid comparison to be made to 2011’s Troll Hunter in the way Norwegian folklore is evoked and revamped to suit underlying thematic concerns; where André Øvredal used his titular beings as conduits to a sly satire on government procedure, Nordaas tailors his representation of the huldra—as the mysterious woman may or may not be—to an intriguing treatise on evolution, and a frank investigation into evil as an inherent concept.
Bearing more ambition than it garners success, Thale is a strange little enigma of a movie, an effectively creepy no-budget horror with some fascinating ideas it doesn’t quite have the faculties to explore in-depth. Its lacking dramatic efforts—forced tension between the men, hopelessly laden with cliché—find forgiveness in the scope of its underlying themes, and the eerily effective way Nordaas manages to turn the drawbacks of his production to strengths. He has been quietly making little horror movies in his own corner of the world for some years now. Thale is the sort of film that, though unlikely to make much of an impact itself, will earn him bigger jobs and broader opportunities. As good a turn of events as this will be to him, considering the vast potential on display here, it’s we who stand to truly benefit.
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