A tentacled horror from the deep creature feature sounds like it could be solid bottom-drawer B-movie entertainment. You don’t have to get far into Pål Øie’s Kraken to figure out that the entertainment here is top-drawer B-movie entertainment, hoisted improbably from the murky floor to thrash in the light.
Øie sets the stage with some sweeping, breathtaking shots of Norway’s fjords, and shimmering kraken-eye underwater shots that wouldn’t be out of place in a nature documentary. Slithering through those images, as out of some prehistoric past, are the kind of canny, oozing practical effects filmmaking that the digital era supposedly drove to extinction long ago. The vast bulk of the titular Cthulian monstrosity is seen only as shadows underwater, or moving in half-darkness and mist. Closer-up, there are pulsating, multi-legged, squirming Ridley-Scott-alien inspired kraken-parasites, and giant suckers on giant-er tentacles which slide after humans clambering breathlessly through boat hatchways and passages.
Not least of the attractions is that the main human, Johanne (Sara Khorami) has a perfect face for horror—more magnetic for not being Hollywood beautiful, with a marvelous range of expression that reacts with nuances of terror, awe and determination to each marvelous discovery and/or each improbable escalation of unpleasantness.
The plot runs through its tropes with a sturdy, and at times impassioned, conviction. Johanne’s a marine biologist investigating strange occurrences on a fish farm; salmon have thrown themselves onshore in clumps, and two motor-boating young men have disappeared (in a delightfully-orchestrated and bloody scene). A sonic tool for killing salmon parasites is responsible for the disorder—though it takes a bit of time for Johanne to discover that said sonic tool has summoned some hideous thing from below.
It's never clear whether those suicidal salmon (and a flock of cute crabs) are running away from the sonic delouser, or whether they’re fleeing the kraken the delouser attracted. This isn’t a plot hole so much as a metaphorical ambiguity. In many shark attack films, the nature/human battle occurs through a displaced bad faith; the movies pretend that sharks are more dangerous to humans than the other way around, when the truth is that it’s humans who kill 100 million sharks a year. But in Kraken, the sea monster is a consequence and an embodiment of humanity’s assault on the natural world. What blights the fjord, and which kills fish and people alike, is human-caused environmental disaster, which manifests in disordered animal behavior patterns and various vile secretions. It doesn’t matter whether the crabs are scurrying away from us or from the kraken, because the kraken’s also us.
The kraken’s a tactile antagonist; it’s humans themselves. But it’s also the mysterious, unassimilable totality of nature—all that we can’t know, all that could toss us off the planet with one indifferent shrug of what we can’t even identify as shoulders. In that sense, Kraken channels Clive Barker’s aesthetic—not least in the bondage intimations as those tentacles slip suggestively over dripping Johanne. Towards the end, as we get our clearest image of the whole, and as Johanne stares into its enormous eye, the film moves from ecological warning to a kind of celebration of the shattering encounter with an unknowable pagan divine. It’s to Øie’s credit that—defying the obvious—he follows Barker to the end in embracing what the outcome of such an encounter must be.
A Norwegian monster feature by an obscure director with no marquee stars isn’t going to win any awards and is unlikely to be remembered by this time next year. Foreign dreck genre product doesn’t have a long shelf life in the US. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ve seen a release this year that was as exhilarating in its love of film-making, of the world film-making can show us, and of the world film-making can’t. It’s a small movie, but there’s a lot of craft there below the surface. You won’t be sorry if you let it swallow you.