This Greenland-set drama from Danish director Isabella Eklöf, about a husband and father dealing with the trauma of abuse, makes for oppressively grim and only occasionally revelatory viewing.
The strangely evolving trauma that is experiencing by a man who was sexually abused by his own father plays out in the grimly compelling, Greenland-set Kalak, the intriguing new film by Danish filmmaker Isabella Eklöf who debuted in 2018 with the sunnily-violent psychodrama, Holiday.
Perhaps taking some of its thematic cues from ’90s Danish classic, Festen, in which an abusive patriarch is finally toppled by his anguished brood, Kalak (which translates as the pejorative expression, “Dirty Greenlander”) is a film more interested in charting the different ways that the psychological fall-out from such behaviour can manifest in what appears to be a well-adjusted husband and father.
Jan (Emil Johnsen) has uprooted his family – wife and two pre-teen kids – so he can work as a duty nurse in the understaffed and under-resourced township Nuuk in Greenland. Eklöf and cinematographer Nadim Carlsen capture the desolate, forbidding beauty of a landscape in which houses slot in between the rocky outcrops, and urban areas appear to be in perpetually unfinished. And Jan et al seem to love and appreciate the setting, doing their best to immerse themselves in the culture despite the spectre of Danish colonialism hanging heavy over their heads.
One day, Jan announces to his wife that he has taken a local lover, and that he’ll continue sleeping with her alongside his duties as a father and a doctor. His behaviour seems off, but his wife lets him act out this sexual fantasy, possibly knowing something about Jan that the audience doesn’t. When this potentially utopian set-up goes violently wrong, the touch paper is then lit for Jan’s incremental descent into addiction and mania.
It’s a dark proposition for sure, and Jan’s attempts to ease his mind and dull his bitter memories lead down a number of paths that make for deeply uncomfortable, if unsurprising viewing. Jan is someone who has been emboldened by his trauma, and his willingness to hurt himself and others is not great business for someone in the health trade.
The setting is what makes the film interesting and unique, even if the storytelling often leaves much to be desired: heavy-handed signposting hand-holds us through a number of twists and revelations; there’s something naggingly schematic about how this fall from grace plays out. Indeed, the film’s dramatic structure is sometimes so conventional that it’s surprising to read in the end credits that Kayak is based on an autobiographical novel by Kim Leine.
Published 26 Sep 2023
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