Troll 2

The Stone Heart of Heritage

Cinema has long struggled with the problem of the sequel, particularly when the original film was a lightning-in-a-bottle success born of specific cultural soil. Roar Uthaug’s *Troll* (2022) was a delightful anomaly—a kaiju film that felt distinctly, stubbornly Norwegian, trading the steel skyscrapers of American blockbusters for the mossy, mist-clinging mystery of the Dovre mountains. Now, with *Troll 2* (2025), Uthaug returns to the folklore that made his name, but the result is a film at war with itself: a spectacle that reaches for the global blockbuster stratosphere while its feet desperately try to find purchase on slippery Nordic rock.

The narrative logic here is familiar, perhaps too much so. We find our paleontologist protagonist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) in a self-imposed exile, a woman haunted by the knowledge that the myths she studied are not merely academic but breathing, lethal realities. When a new, more aggressive entity—dubbed "Jotun" by the ever-wry government advisor Andreas (Kim S. Falck-Jørgensen)—awakens in the depths of a Rjukan power station, the film initially promises a meditation on our modern intrusion into ancient spaces. The image of the creature bursting forth from beneath a hydroelectric dam is potent; it suggests that our attempts to harness nature’s power are merely temporary leases on a debt we cannot pay.

However, where the first film allowed the troll to be a tragic, lonely figure—a King Kong of the North—*Troll 2* falls into the trap of escalation. It is not enough to have a monster; we must now have a war. The introduction of a second, "benevolent" troll to combat the aggressor pushes the film dangerously close to the *Godzilla vs. Kong* dynamic, stripping the creatures of their eerie, elemental mystique and reducing them to wrestling action figures. The visual language suffers for it. The cinematography, once rich with the damp, grey textures of the Norwegian wilderness, now often succumbs to a flat, digital sheen common in streaming epics. When the "Megatroll" tears the roof off a nightclub in a widely discussed sequence, the moment is designed for viral clips rather than genuine terror. It is a scene of havoc, certainly, but it lacks the suffocating atmosphere of the first film's mountain encounters.

Yet, Uthaug is a director of considerable heart, and he refuses to let the human element vanish entirely behind the CGI debris. Ine Marie Wilmann anchors the chaos with a performance of frantic intelligence. Her Nora is not an action hero in the traditional sense; she is a translator between two worlds that refuse to understand each other. Her struggle is not just to survive, but to preserve a history that the government—and the church before it, represented by the recurring motif of Saint Olaf—sought to erase. The film is strongest when it dwells on this melancholy: the idea that these creatures are not invading our world, but reclaiming a home we paved over.

There is a sequence near the climax, amidst the ruins of Trondheim, where the noise of the blockbuster fades, and Nora stares into the eyes of the beast. For a brief second, the film transcends its genre mechanics. We see not a monster, but a displaced refugee of history, bewildered by the lights and the noise of a century that has no place for it.

Ultimately, *Troll 2* is a louder, faster, and more aggressive beast than its predecessor. It serves the appetite for spectacle with efficiency, delivering the earth-shaking destruction that the genre demands. But in trading the intimate, moss-covered horror of the original for a city-leveling showdown, it loses a piece of its soul. It is a film that screams to be heard, yet one cannot help but miss the quiet, ominous rumble of the mountain that started it all.