9 / 10
André Øvredal came to Mortal from Norwegian horror. Trollhunter in 2010 and The Autopsy of Jane Doe in 2016 both treat supernatural material as if it were happening in a country with actual landscape, weather and people, and Mortal does the same thing with Norse mythology. The result is the best Thor origin story ever filmed, and the title character is never called Thor.
The 9 is for a film that almost nobody saw because the distributor buried it. Mortal arrived in 2020 during the pandemic. Saban Films released it to limited theaters and video on demand at the same time. The reviews were mixed because critics expected a Marvel-style superhero film and got a Norwegian psychological thriller instead. Audiences who watched it without expectations generally liked it. The film deserves considerably more attention than it’s received.
I’m a sucker for a film that trusts its audience to wait, and Mortal waits beautifully. It gives you a frightened young man in the woods, a psychologist with a notepad and a lot of cold Norwegian weather, and it makes those things more gripping than any skyline getting leveled in a Marvel finale. I’d take this over most of the superhero films that made a billion dollars. My one gripe is that it ends before I was ready to leave that world.
The Setup
Eric Bergland (Nat Wolff) is a young American man wandering the Norwegian wilderness in the opening sequence. He hasn’t slept properly in days. He can’t remember exactly what happened to him.
Both Norwegian police and his own genetic inheritance are hunting him. Eric has discovered that he can generate electrical energy with his hands. He’s accidentally killed a teenage boy in a forest encounter. He doesn’t know what he is. He needs help understanding what he’s become.
Christine Ardal (Iben Akerlie) is a young Norwegian psychologist working at the local hospital.
She’s assigned to evaluate Eric after the police bring him in. Her evaluation is supposed to be a routine assessment. The evaluation becomes the relationship that drives the film. Christine is the first person to listen to Eric without immediately concluding that he’s delusional. The film is their conversation, expanded across the runtime to include the institutional forces trying to control what Eric has become.
The Discovery
The film handles the discovery of Eric’s powers with a patience American superhero films almost never show.
For the first thirty minutes Eric, the audience, the Norwegian police and the American embassy are all equally in the dark about what he is. Christine notices that his body temperature is raised, that electrical equipment malfunctions near him, and that he has burns and scars he can’t explain. I adore this stretch. I’d happily watch a whole film of Christine adding up clues about a patient who shouldn’t exist.
The American embassy sends a representative named Henrik (Per Frisch) to retrieve Eric.
The representative knows more than he tells Christine. He has been monitoring Eric’s situation for longer than Eric realizes. The American government has institutional interest in Eric because Eric has done something specific that triggered alerts in monitoring systems that exist for exactly this kind of person. The film doesn’t announce what those systems are. It lets the existence of the systems imply the larger world Eric belongs to.
For Writers
Mortal shows the value of withholding the central premise from the audience for the first third of the film. American superhero films typically open with the protagonist’s origin and let the audience watch the discovery process from a position of knowing more than the character. Mortal reverses this. The audience and the character discover what Eric is at the same time. The reveal works better because the audience has worked toward it alongside Eric for the previous thirty minutes.
The lesson for writers is that knowledge gaps between audience and character can be deployed either direction. Letting the audience know more than the character produces dramatic irony. Letting the character know more than the audience produces mystery. Letting the audience and character discover together produces shared experience. All three approaches are valid. Mortal chose the third approach and the choice generates the film’s distinctive emotional weight.
The Performances
Nat Wolff plays Eric as a man broken by what is happening to him.
He doesn’t understand his powers and doesn’t want them. He’s killing people accidentally and the killings are accumulating regardless of his intentions. Wolff plays the confusion and the guilt without ever giving Eric the performance markers that American superhero films use to signal protagonist heroism. Eric has no quip and no swagger, and he’s terrified through most of the runtime.
Wolff was previously known for The Fault in Our Stars and The Stand. The performances had been competent without being distinguished.
Mortal is the role where Wolff shows what he’s capable of when the material requires interior work instead of exterior charm. The performance is the foundation the film builds on. If Wolff doesn’t sell Eric’s terror, the film collapses. He sells it completely.
Wolff is the reason I buy any of this. The fear never leaves his face, and he lets Eric be dangerous and pitiable in the same breath. I think a more conventional leading man, flexing and quipping through these scenes, would have sunk the whole film.
Iben Akerlie plays Christine as a working psychologist doing her job under increasingly impossible circumstances. The performance is grounded. Christine is intelligent without being implausibly intelligent and sympathetic without being sentimentally sympathetic. She listens to Eric and tries to help him, but she also recognizes the danger he represents to herself, to the hospital, and to the surrounding community. The character isn’t a romantic interest construct designed to provide emotional support. Christine is a professional engaging with a difficult patient who happens to be more than a patient.
The supporting cast of Norwegian actors brings the kind of grounded ensemble work that Scandinavian cinema produces routinely. The hospital staff feels like actual hospital staff. The police officers feel like actual police officers. The townspeople feel like actual townspeople. The film never breaks the illusion that all of this is happening in a recognizable Norway populated by recognizable Norwegians.
The Norwegian Landscape
Øvredal shoots Norway as a character. The fjords, waterfalls and forests, the small towns with wooden houses and church spires, the mountain roads and stone bridges all appear with a specificity that tells you the director knows these places and how to film them. Cinematographer Roman Osin gives the country the kind of attention travel documentaries rarely manage. I’d frame half these shots, and I think the cold coming off the screen does more for the mythology than any effects budget could.
The decision to shoot in the actual locations instead of on soundstages or in cheaper international substitutes gives the film its distinctive atmosphere.
Eric is alone in a Norwegian forest in the opening sequence because the production shot him alone in a Norwegian forest. The cold is real. The wind is real. The water is real. The film has a physical reality that American superhero productions, shot largely on green screen, simply can’t match.
Norway is also a country where the old gods are still part of the culture.
The hospital staff include people who half-believe what Eric is becoming because their grandparents told them stories that turn out to be true. The film doesn’t need to introduce the audience to Norse mythology. It assumes Norwegian familiarity with Norse mythology and lets the assumption carry the worldbuilding. American audiences receive enough context to follow the story. Norwegian audiences receive a film that speaks their cultural language.
The Marvel Comparison
Marvel Studios released Thor in 2011. Kenneth Branagh directed Chris Hemsworth as the Asgardian thunder god in a film that’s Shakespearean fantasy filtered through American comic book convention. The Marvel Thor is good, but it’s also a comic book adaptation that uses Norse mythology as costume instead of as content.
Mortal is what a Thor film looks like when the director treats Norse mythology as living tradition instead of as costume. Eric Bergland isn’t Thor but a man who discovers he’s descended from someone the Norse gods may have been. The mythology is presented as folklore that may be more accurate than the modern world has acknowledged. The lightning powers aren’t superhero abilities but the manifestation of inheritance from beings that didn’t technically die when the Christian conversion of Scandinavia drove their worship underground.
The American superhero approach makes the protagonist a hero. The Norwegian approach makes the protagonist a danger. Eric doesn’t want to be powerful. Eric is killing people. Eric needs the powers contained. The film treats his condition as something closer to a curse than to a gift. This framing is closer to how Norse mythology itself treats divine inheritance than the Marvel approach is. The Norse gods weren’t heroes. The Norse gods were terrifying forces that humans propitiated and survived. Mortal honors this tradition. The Marvel films honor a different tradition.
For Writers
Mortal shows the value of treating mythological material on its own terms instead of translating it into modern superhero conventions. The Norse gods weren’t friendly or relatable, and they weren’t pursuing personal growth or romantic subplots. They were powerful, dangerous, often cruel, and frequently destructive of the humans who encountered them. Mortal treats Eric’s inheritance as belonging to that tradition. He’s dangerous. The danger is the inheritance, and it isn’t something he can simply learn to control through training montages and supportive friendships.
The lesson for writers is that source material has its own internal logic, and adapting source material works best when the adaptation respects that logic instead of imposing more familiar logics on top of it. Norse mythology isn’t Christian mythology. Norse mythology isn’t American superhero mythology. Norse mythology has its own rules. Mortal follows the rules of its source. Marvel writes new rules and applies them to characters with Norse names.
The Direction
Øvredal directs the film with the patience that horror filmmakers develop. He understands that suspense is generated through duration and restraint instead of through cutting rhythm and music cues. The opening sequence with Eric alone in the forest runs without dialogue for considerable duration. The audience watches him struggle with what he’s becoming before the film tells the audience what he’s becoming. The patience pays off.
The set pieces are physical instead of digital.
When Eric generates electrical power, the effects are practical when possible and CGI only when necessary. The combination produces lightning that feels like actual lightning instead of like cartoon energy bolts. The destruction happens at human scale instead of at city-wide scale. A car is destroyed. A building is damaged. A small group of people is killed. The film never inflates the consequences to the level Marvel productions routinely deploy. The intimate scale makes the violence feel weightier than larger-scale superhero violence typically does.
Øvredal also understands tonal range. The film has moments of real humor. Christine and Eric develop a working relationship that occasionally produces small comic exchanges. The film never treats itself as too serious to acknowledge that two young people who like each other will sometimes say funny things. The humor is restrained but also present. The combination produces a film that feels alive instead of relentlessly grim.
The Ending
The film ends with the setup for a sequel that may never come. Eric has discovered the full extent of what he is. The American intelligence operatives have closed in.
Christine has made decisions about her role in what happens next. The final sequence positions the film as the opening chapter of a larger story. The larger story hasn’t been told. Saban Films hasn’t announced a sequel. The director has moved on to other projects. The audience that watched Mortal in 2020 may have to live with the ending the film provided.
The ending works on its own terms even without continuation.
Eric has accepted what he is. Christine has accepted who Eric is. The institutional forces are still trying to contain what Eric represents. The story could continue, but it has also reached an emotionally complete stopping point. The film doesn’t depend on a sequel for its primary effects to land. A sequel would be welcome but isn’t required.
That ending is the one place I’d grumble. I wanted the next chapter, and knowing it may never arrive stings more than it should for a film this sure of itself. Still, the story it does tell is whole, and I’ll take that over a two-hour trailer for a sequel.
The Distribution Failure
Saban Films released Mortal in November 2020 to limited theaters and video on demand.
The pandemic had been ongoing for nine months. The theatrical market was effectively closed. Saban had limited resources for marketing. The film wasn’t given the platform it deserved. American audiences who would have responded to it had no realistic way to discover it.
The reviews were divided. American critics expecting Marvel-style superhero adventure were disappointed. Norwegian and European critics responded more favorably. The film has slowly built a small audience through word of mouth in the years since its release. It deserves a considerably larger audience than it’s so far reached. The distribution failure is a structural problem with the modern film market instead of a problem with the film itself.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Mortal is the example case for what happens when a competent filmmaker takes a familiar genre and applies the conventions of a different national cinema to it. The American superhero film works inside established conventions that audiences have absorbed across two decades of MCU productions. Origins are quick. Powers are exciting. Mentors appear. Training montages happen. The hero learns to use the power, deploys it against an antagonist, and saves something or someone.
Mortal doesn’t follow any of these conventions. The origin is slow. The power is terrifying. The mentor is a psychologist who doesn’t know what she’s dealing with. There are no training montages. The hero never learns to control the power and doesn’t save anything. He just survives long enough to understand what he is. The film works because the Norwegian horror tradition Øvredal comes from has different assumptions about what a story should accomplish. American audiences raised on Marvel may need to recalibrate. The recalibration is worth doing. Mortal is what superhero cinema looks like when the director treats the source material as folklore instead of as merchandise.
The Verdict
A 9. Mortal is the best Thor origin story ever filmed and the title character is never called Thor. André Øvredal brought Norwegian horror sensibility to superhero material and produced a film that reaches further than most American superhero productions manage.
Nat Wolff delivers the performance of his career. Iben Akerlie grounds the film with the kind of professional realism that Scandinavian ensemble work produces routinely. The Norwegian landscape becomes a character. The Norse mythology is treated as living tradition instead of as costume.
The only thing keeping this from a 10 is that it stops just as it gets going, and I hold a grudge against the pandemic-era release that buried a film this good where nobody could find it. The 9 is for Wolff’s terror, for Norway, and for a director who made the old gods frightening on screen. Track it down and hand it to anyone who thinks superhero films have run out of ideas.
