Arctic (2019) - Just A Short While!

★★★☆☆

The film opens with an intriguing scene where a seemingly battled, exhausted man is digging up trenches on some snow covered land that is supposed to be part of the Arctic as we learn from the title. It seems like he's looking for something underground at first but later as the camera allows us to look at it from high above, we realize that he's in fact digging up to display three big letters: SOS! He has been hoping for some time that someone flying over would notice it and help him out. Now we know that he's a man stranded alone in a place where some would, ironically, go for fun and excitement instead!

'Arctic' is a very quiet film with few dialogues. It would have been, I guess, completely dialogue-free if Mads Mikkelsen's Overgard hadn't run into the woman and the other guy who unfortunately crash their helicopter trying to rescue him. As the other guy dies at the scene, left is Overgard finally making up his mind to want to carry the injured woman in a sledge to the nearest seasonal station up north just on foot. The journey could be so hard to finish even for a strong healthy person. Two dying souls would just mean no chance of success to reach it and survive! But Overgard is not giving up, neither on himself nor on the woman, not until... well, I'd better leave you to find out for yourself. All I can tell is, the film ends exactly the way it should, nice and neat in a sense!

This is a film about making hard choices to survive an exceedingly harsh scenario. It reminds me of another one-man show of survival, Tom Hanks' 'Cast Away' in 2000, from which we're supposed to learn that nothing should be taken for granted, not even the air we breathe every single second. In Buddhism, the worst enemy to the Enlightenment is but our habits. Our habit of regretting the past and worrying about the future and therefore unable to live in the present; of differentiating things so as to feel easy and proud; of seeing things as a whole, not as compound, and therefore we feel like everything every day is more or less the same! We're never really able to appreciate things around because we see them not as they are but as we think they are. So an encouraging film like 'Arctic' is much more preferred to some mindless blockbusters out there because it may make you see the truth even if it's for just a short while!