AUSTIN, Texas – Norwegian horror flick Thale is a little film, in the sense that it was shot on a very low budget with a very small cast, and that director Aleksander Nordaas also served as writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and camera operator. It was shot on sets constructed in his father's basement.
[bug id="sxsw2012"] But it's large in scope, dealing with supernatural beings, ancient folklore and broadly human themes of guilt and redemption. It also exhibits the swagger of a bigger movie – the lead actors are fully possessed by the material, the special effects are quite good considering the budget, and the sound design works to great effect to amp up the suspense. It's gruesome and jittery, and will satisfy fans of Hollywood-style horror. And while some of the gentler, emotional material falls flat, Thale (pronounced "tall-eh") does prod the brain and the heart enough for me to recommend it.
I attended the opening-night screening here, where the film played to a packed house and was introduced by South by Southwest festival co-founder Louis Black. He expressed his pride that a subtitled, ultra-independent horror film from Norway would be greeted by a sold-out audience. Considering the buzz around André Øvredal's 2011 found-footage horror mockumentary The Troll Hunter (now set for an American remake), it would seem Norwegian dark fantasy is a hot ticket these days. Black shouldn't be so surprised.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
Thale starts off as a standard horror-mystery. We spend the first third of the film with two employees from a cleaning service that specializes in removing human remains from crime scenes and death sites – possibly one of the worst jobs in Norway, though I imagine the pay is decent. Elvis (played by Erlend Nervold) is a novice whose enthusiasm for scooping up blood and guts measures less than zero, but he needs the money, so he suffers through it. Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) is his friend from childhood and a seasoned pro at mopping up blood and brains. He's stoic and unflappable, and not only about the work. One wonders whether he feels or cares about anything at all, ever.
The duo is sent to a remote house tucked away in the woods to collect the scattered remains of an old man who was apparently torn apart by wolves. Exploring his home, they find a hidden door. Behind the door, they find a secret laboratory where he was conducting some sort of biological experiments. In the lab are a tape recorder conveniently filled with his audio diaries, a mini-fridge we somehow sense is not stocked with Aquavit and smoked salmon, and a bathtub that is not surprisingly found to contain a fetching young woman (Silje Reinåmo in the dialog-free title role). We learn she's been kept alive for a number of years by means of feeding tubes. She was the subject of the old man's medical experiments, and the contents of the fridge belong to her.
She's a Huldra, a creature from Norwegian folklore, a beautiful young woman who lives in the woods and possesses supernatural powers (and a cow's tail). She can heal with a touch, she can form instant psychic bonds with humans to transmit memories and thoughts, or she can snap your neck like a twig in an instant.
In voiceover, we discover the old man found her as a child in the woods and has been keeping her in secret. She was an escapee of sorts, and the people who she escaped from have never stopped looking for her. What happens to Elvis, Leo and Thale, I shall not say, except to report that there's a lot of creeping suspense peppered with fast-paced action and plenty of splattering gore. It's all fun to watch.
I knew nothing of huldra going into the screening here (apparently it's a myth well-known among Scandanavians) but that didn't temper my enjoyment one bit. After the screening, young auteur Nordaas came onstage and addressed his desire to make a movie about psychic forest nymphs.
"As a filmmaker from Norway, who wouldn't want to make a film about the Huldra?" Nordaas said. "The folklore from our country, it's a treasure chest."
If Thale makes as much of a stir in the United States as Troll Hunter did last year, we may soon learn what else is stored in that treasure chest.
