Commenter dave-1827 has it right. The brutally sudden transition at the end, when Saiva apparently ceases to be the damaged but recognizably human personality she has been for the previous 85 minutes and suddenly becomes an automated machine of mythic destruction, simply does not work: the transition does not add an interesting twist, or take the story onto another level, it's simply a noisy and inept crashing of narrative gears, that becomes more irritating the more I think about it. The character Saiva, as beautifully portrayed by Michelle Yeoh in the main, "realistic" body of the film, could simply never perform the actions the story gives her at the end out of such a banal motive as sexual jealousy -- the only plausible motivation she is given. The person who struggled to shake off the "curse" her tribe had hung around her neck would not suddenly embrace it to this ridiculous extent.
So are we meant to "read back" this mythic take into the rest of the, at first glance realistic, story? If so, the setting is a problem: The clothing and speech seem to indicate a Siberian setting. Does it become "mythic" because a couple of the Chukchi reindeer herders appear, inexplicably, to hail from Mumbai rather than Chukotka? Not really -- it just looks ridiculous. The rifles are plainly later 20th century; the outboard motor suggests a date sometime after 1960; and the wind-up radio places it after 1996 (Trevor Baylis invented the idea in 1989; Baygen produced the first commercial models in 1996). So what war were Russian soldiers fighting in Siberia after 1996? Sorry, but you can't have it both ways: if you put your story in such a distinctly real place and such a recent time, you can't expect people to accept it as a mythic anytime or a fictitious anywhere. Kapadia's earlier film "Warrior" was similarly set in a location and period that couldn't quite be pinned down, but that didn't present a problem because the period in question was at least several centuries safely in the past. He should have remembered that example this time round, or for a similar idea in an Arctic setting he should have looked at Nils Gaup's wonderful, and *consistently* mythic, "Ofelas" ("Pathfinder", 1987, not the dreadful 2007 remake). The reviewer for "Variety" hit the nail on the head: the climax of "Far North" requires a "suspension of disbelief the pic doesn't earn".
I'm giving this film 6 stars simply in recognition of two wonderful performances, from Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean, who both portray the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of real human beings in what they must have assumed was intended to be a realistic setting.
What the film demonstrates, surprisingly, is that mythic archetypes do not actually provide much insight into human psychology -- they were simply the best adumbrations of human types that pre-literate societies could come up with. Anyone who's read a novel by George Eliot or Hermann Hesse or Hardy or Mann has access to far richer, truer, more complex and more convincing portrayals of human personalities than were available to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, or anyone else. It's three dimensions instead of one, colour instead of black and white.
So are we meant to "read back" this mythic take into the rest of the, at first glance realistic, story? If so, the setting is a problem: The clothing and speech seem to indicate a Siberian setting. Does it become "mythic" because a couple of the Chukchi reindeer herders appear, inexplicably, to hail from Mumbai rather than Chukotka? Not really -- it just looks ridiculous. The rifles are plainly later 20th century; the outboard motor suggests a date sometime after 1960; and the wind-up radio places it after 1996 (Trevor Baylis invented the idea in 1989; Baygen produced the first commercial models in 1996). So what war were Russian soldiers fighting in Siberia after 1996? Sorry, but you can't have it both ways: if you put your story in such a distinctly real place and such a recent time, you can't expect people to accept it as a mythic anytime or a fictitious anywhere. Kapadia's earlier film "Warrior" was similarly set in a location and period that couldn't quite be pinned down, but that didn't present a problem because the period in question was at least several centuries safely in the past. He should have remembered that example this time round, or for a similar idea in an Arctic setting he should have looked at Nils Gaup's wonderful, and *consistently* mythic, "Ofelas" ("Pathfinder", 1987, not the dreadful 2007 remake). The reviewer for "Variety" hit the nail on the head: the climax of "Far North" requires a "suspension of disbelief the pic doesn't earn".
I'm giving this film 6 stars simply in recognition of two wonderful performances, from Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean, who both portray the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of real human beings in what they must have assumed was intended to be a realistic setting.
What the film demonstrates, surprisingly, is that mythic archetypes do not actually provide much insight into human psychology -- they were simply the best adumbrations of human types that pre-literate societies could come up with. Anyone who's read a novel by George Eliot or Hermann Hesse or Hardy or Mann has access to far richer, truer, more complex and more convincing portrayals of human personalities than were available to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, or anyone else. It's three dimensions instead of one, colour instead of black and white.