Troll

The Echo of the Mountain King

There is a profound melancholy in the monster movies of the 21st century that was largely absent in their mid-century ancestors. If *Godzilla* was born of nuclear anxiety—a sharp, jagged reaction to the bomb—Roar Uthaug’s *Troll* (2022) is born of a quieter, sadder realization: that we have paved over our own myths. Uthaug, who previously helmed the disaster epic *The Wave*, returns here to the Norwegian landscape not just to destroy it, but to ask what it remembers. This is not merely a creature feature; it is a film about the violent return of the repressed, where the "monster" is less an enemy and more a tragic landlord returning to evict the tenants who forgot he ever existed.



Visually, Uthaug grounds the fantastical in a tactile, grey-blue reality. The film’s aesthetic is one of wet stone, moss, and overcast skies—a palette that makes the sudden eruption of the impossible feel disturbingly plausible. When the titular Troll awakens, triggered by an industrial explosion in the Dovre mountains, he does not look like a glistening CGI construct dropped into a live-action plate. He looks like the mountain itself deciding to stand up. The visual language emphasizes scale not for the sake of spectacle, but to highlight human insignificance. We see the creature through the windshields of tiny cars and the lenses of trembling smartphones, a perspective that forces the audience to look *up* in awe rather than *at* in judgment.

The narrative spine of the film is built around Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann), a paleontologist who has traded her father’s folklore obsessions for the safety of hard science. The script, while occasionally stumbling into the familiar rhythms of the Hollywood blockbuster (the skeptical military, the misunderstood expert), finds its soul in the relationship between Nora and her father, Tobias. Tobias is not merely a "crazy old man"; he represents a cultural memory that Norway—and the modern world—has aggressively secularized and sanitized.



The film’s central conflict is not truly Man vs. Beast, but rather Modernity vs. Heritage. The Troll is repelled by the sound of church bells—a brilliant narrative stroke that transforms the creature from a generic beast into a specific casualty of Christian colonization. He is not a random mutation; he is the old god displaced by the new. The scenes where the military attempts to engage the creature with high-tech weaponry feel futile not because of firepower, but because they are trying to solve a spiritual problem with ballistics. The destruction of Oslo is not just collateral damage; it is the shattering of the glass-and-steel illusion that we have tamed the natural world.



In the end, *Troll* succeeds because it refuses to fully villainize its antagonist. The creature’s gaze, weathered and ancient, holds a weariness that mirrors the landscape itself. Uthaug manages to craft a blockbuster that feels distinctly Norwegian—wry, grounded, and deeply respectful of the dark forests that border civilization. It serves as a reminder that some things in the earth are best left sleeping, and that when we blast tunnels through history, we shouldn't be surprised when history hits back. This is a film that asks us to tread lightly, for the mountains are watching.