Review | Berlin 2022: Against the Ice movie review – Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars in gruelling true-life survival drama coming to Netflix
- Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is Ejnar Mikkelsen, a Danish explorer who crosses icy northern Greenland by dogsled with just one companion on a gruelling 1909 mission
- Inevitably disaster strikes, in a scene that’s brilliantly filmed, and there’s a shocking scene with echoes of The Revenant. You’ll feel the pair’s every step
3.5/5 stars
A film that will chill you to the bone, Against the Ice is a passion project for co-writer and star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Playing in a Special Gala presentation at the Berlin International Film Festival before it appears on Netflix in early March, the film sees the former Game of Thrones actor take centre stage in this true story.
Coster-Waldau plays Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen, a Danish explorer who led an expedition in 1909 to northeastern Greenland in the Arctic. The mission was designed to find incontrovertible evidence that the mostly ice-covered country was not split in two, and thereby dispute a United States territorial claim to part of it.
Mikkelsen’s men were preceded, two years earlier, by another group, known as The Danish Expedition, which ended in fatalities, the explorers never returning home. Mikkelsen’s trip is part (unlikely) rescue mission, but the treacherous conditions mean only he and one other can take their sleds across the ice, while the rest of the crew remain with the boat, the Alabama.
Volunteering to go with him is ex-Navy mechanic Iver Iverson (Gangs of London star Joe Cole), an upbeat fellow who perhaps doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for.
Disaster strikes early when Iver accidentally loses control of one of the sleds, losing vital supplies and – crushingly – his lead dog, Bjorn, in a terrifyingly vertiginous sequence, brilliantly realised by director Peter Flinth and his team. The more it unfolds, the more you marvel at man’s capacity for endurance.
