Growth of the Soil

Now enjoying a wave of international prominence and success thanks to filmmakers such as Joachim Trier and Dag Johan Haugerud, Norwegian cinema continues to go from strength to strength with this remarkable achievement by one of the country’s most venerable talents. A director best known for his collaborations with actor Stellan Skarsgård, Hans Petter Moland demonstrates formidable command of his art with this powerful and richly textured adaptation of Growth of the Soil, the 1917 novel that won its author Knut Hamsun the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sharing the original’s fervently realistic style and reverence for the natural world, Moland’s latest feature opens as the captivating story of one man’s battle with a dauntingly rugged environment. Herbert Nordrum — familiar to Festival audiences for his role in Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (TIFF 2021) — stars as Isak, a solitary man who stubbornly struggles to start a farm in a remote patch of land in northern Norway in the early 20th century. He finds an ally — and eventually a wife — in Inger (Asta Kamma August, also at the Festival in What Lies Between Us), a woman with her own reasons for being on the edge of their society. They build a life together piece by piece. But the inexorable march of modernity brings changes and challenges of many kinds.

Marshalling a heroic effort of their own, Moland and his superb cast ensure that Hamsun’s story of how this couple’s hard-won home cannot protect them from history’s wider forces — or from more human sorts of frailties and failings — comes to the screen with all the grace and gravity it deserves.

JASON ANDERSON

Content advisory: sexually suggestive scenes, mild violence