I'm sure when director Hans Petter Moland set out to make Zero Kelvin, he had the best of intentions. Certainly, the wastelands of snowy Svalbard would seem like the perfect place to make a film about the human condition. After all, what better metaphor for existence could a Northern European filmmaker want? Bergman wishes that he could have set a film in Svalbard. But somehow, this film about a poet, a hunter, and a scientist trapped in Greenland falls flat, both as a thriller (as it is sometimes advertized) and as an art film driven by metaphor and symbolism. The characters seem to drift through the film without direction. This works on some occasions, particularly in the films of Béla Tarr and occasionally Werner Herzog. But there is no meaning, no purpose, and no point to what the characters experience. Roger Ebert once said that if you have to ask what a symbol in a film represents, then it isn't a symbol. Moland seems to have wanted to make Zero Kelvin a symbol for...something...but for the life of me I have no idea what it is. And what does that make the film if I have to ask what its central symbolism means? A non-film? Maybe. Because that's what Zero Kelvin felt like.
4/10
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