Mortal, released in Norway under the title Torden, meaning thunder, is a 2020 fantasy action film directed and co-written by André Øvredal, the filmmaker behind Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. It stars Nat Wolff as Eric Bergland, a young American of Norwegian descent living rough in the wilderness after an incident killed the family he was visiting, and Iben Akerlie as Christine, the psychologist drawn into his situation. Running 104 minutes and made for around seven and a half million dollars, it was partly supported by a grant from the Government of Norway. I want to be transparent about my state of mind writing this: I am so annoyed at this film for wasting my time that I have gone effectively blind to anything positive it might contain. If there was something good in here, I did not register it.

Let me begin with the opening stretch, because it set the tone. The first twenty minutes or so consist largely of Eric moving through the Norwegian wilderness in visible distress, and what that translates to on a sound level is an extended run of heavy breathing, grunting, and laboured noises directly into the audience's ears. I understand the intent, which is to communicate isolation and suffering without dialogue. What I experienced was a man making sounds at me for a third of an hour.

The concept itself is sound, and I want to give it that much. Øvredal has been entirely open about his ambitions here. He wanted to reclaim Norse mythology from the glossy American comic book treatment and place it back into a grounded, intimate, distinctly Norwegian setting, explicitly positioning this as the anti-Marvel Thor. He has said, on the record, that when casting he wanted somebody who was the opposite of Chris Hemsworth. On that specific metric, the film is an unqualified success.

Unfortunately, ambition is not execution. The pacing is inert, the film keeps stalling out between its few genuine set pieces, and the performances are, to use my own technical terminology, dogwater. This is not merely my own irritation talking either; the professional critical response was largely negative, with reviews taking aim at the pacing, the screenplay, and the listless quality of the performances. Several reviewers also noted strange editing decisions towards the end that produce confusing connections between scenes, possibly a symptom of significant cuts made to bring the runtime down.

And then there is the ending, which is where my patience left the building entirely. This film does not conclude. It stops. It halts squarely in the middle of its own story, quite plainly laying groundwork for a sequel, and then rolls credits. There is not even a post-credits scene to justify sitting through them. Roger Ebert's review put it bluntly, observing that the film sets itself up for sequels by ending right in the middle of its story, and that is precisely what it feels like from the seat.