Against the Ice on Netflix — a Greenland survival story that prefers stillness to spectacle

Peter Flinth’s 2022 adaptation of Ejnar Mikkelsen’s polar memoir follows two men across the ice for months — and trusts the camera to sit with them when nothing happens.

Against the Ice opens in 1909, with the Danish Alabama Expedition stranded on the east coast of Greenland. Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) needs to recover a journal that disproves the United States’ claim that Greenland is two separate landmasses. He leaves the rest of the crew with the ship and sets out across the ice with one volunteer, the mechanic Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), who has never sledded in his life. The trek out is the easy part.

What follows is a long two-hander. The pair find the cairn and the proof; the return is when the story actually starts. They drag themselves back across the ice on diminishing rations, lose dogs, weather a polar bear attack and finally reach the Alabama only to discover the ship has been crushed and the rest of the crew has gone. The film keeps Coster-Waldau and Cole alone on screen for long stretches, and the script — co-written by Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick from Mikkelsen’s own memoir Two Against the Ice — refuses the temptation to invent action where there wasn’t any.

Peter Flinth directs in a restrained, almost television-minded register. The production is a Danish-Icelandic affair: Baltasar Kormákur’s RVK Studios produced it, Torben Forsberg shot it on location in Iceland and Greenland, and Heida Reed and Charles Dance bookend the cast back at home. The Berlinale gave it a Special Gala slot in February 2022 before Netflix put it out worldwide a fortnight later.

The intent is clearly a small, honest film rather than a blockbuster. Coster-Waldau, who carries the project as star, co-writer and producer, is interested in fatigue and tedium more than heroic survival beats. The camera lingers on cracked lips and frostbitten cheeks, and the script leaves long silences for the two men to ration their words. There’s a stretch in the second act where you can feel the months passing through the cuts rather than the dialogue, which is genuinely effective.

Forsberg’s photography is the film’s best asset — the white horizons, the slate-grey sea, the cramped interior of a hut where the two men eventually start to hallucinate each other’s company. The score sits low under the wind. When the polar bear arrives, the staging is brief and unspectacular, which feels closer to how the real thing would have played out than the set-piece some other production would have engineered.

Against the Ice is not the version of this expedition that will be remembered as definitive, and a few choices — particularly a hallucination subplot the film leans on too hard in its final third — keep it from landing as cleanly as the source memoir does on the page. But there’s an unfussy, dogged quality to it that suits the material. It’s a film about waiting, and it commits to waiting.

Tags: Netflix, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Against the Ice, Charles Dance, Joe Cole, Peter Flinth