Recensioni de* critic*

A touch of self-aggrandizement is far preferable to what Godland ultimately adds up to: a portentous journey of false mystery and thudding mechanism, a film whose aesthetic ambitions are, in the end, merely decorative.

However much skill is on display, the film begins to falter with its lead... [Hove's] character remains too opaque and quiet... Still, if it comes up a bit short against the true downer masterpieces of punishing Euro cinema, Godland’s beauty shouldn’t be taken for granted. It’s just psychology-through-landscape that remains the greatest trick to actually pull off.

[Godland is] a film of extraordinary craft and power. [Its] considerable virtues, which range from breathtaking landscape photography to inhabited performances from a flawless cast, show Pálmason to be working at the height of his powers.

[Godland] is certainly austere. But there’s also a marvelously odd vein of sneaky humor running through it, along with an unpredictability that keeps you glued. In terms of scope, it recalls Martin Scorsese’s Silence, while its taunting questions about the limits of piety call to mind John Michael McDonagh’s criminally underseen Calvary.

[Godland's] predictable downward spiral is almost surprisingly banal next to [its] extremely rich and daring formal setup... Pálmason and director of photography Maria von Hausswolff dare to adopt [Lucas's] same [approach to photography] with their moving pictures, and though the result can have a soporific effect, it is also exceptionally rewarding.

Shot in a tight academy ratio which evokes the glass plates that Lucas uses for his collodion wet plate photographs, this is an engrossing account of a voyage to the dark side of permanent daylight... [Godland] is an accomplished, ambitious work which has a Herzogian fascination with vast, unforgiving landscapes, hubris and madness.

The measured pacing will put some viewers off; [Godland] is stark, slow cinema, full of windswept atmosphere but restrained in its drama. But those willing to give themselves over and follow the customs of Pálmason’s cinema will find a rich and rewarding epic that evokes some of the greats in cinema history without becoming derivative, feeling totally its own beast.

[Godland is] at once visually striking and emotionally austere, in its almost Bressonian restraint... Pálmason is an artist with a most unique sense of pacing... a cinematic original whose voice grows stronger and more certain with each film. And God, as they say, is in the details.

Godland retraces this tormented and cathartic epic journey full of culture shocks with ambitious mastery of the genre and visceral proximity with the characters. And if the exceptional intensity of the first part (the journey) is slightly attenuated in the second chapter, which is more calm (but still tense)... the whole film nevertheless constitutes a work of the very first cinematographic order