Bølgen (The Wave)

seen at the 2015 London Film Festival, 16 October

Directed by Roar Uthaug and starring Kristoffer Joner and Ane Dahl Torp, the film shows the effect of a large rockfall in the Geiranger fjord,concentrating on one family's attempt to survive the resulting tsunami.

The film opens with news footage of earlier natural disasters in the fjord country, and rapidly sets the scene by showing the work of the Åkerneset monitoring station,and the growing alarm of Kristian, who is soon to leave to work in Stavanger. Even on the day that he is supposed to leave the district with his teenage son and young daughter, he cannot stop niggling at some unusual readings, and he returns to the monitoring station to warn his ex-colleagues. (One of them later predicts he will be back within the year, unable to stay away.)

The children consequently join their mother at the Geiranger Hotel where she works, and when Kristian arrives there he takes the girl back to their deserted house, while the boy prefers to enjoy the comforts of the hotel. The family are thus conveniently separated when disaster strikes and the mountainside crashes into the fjord. There is only ten minutes from the sounding of the alarm for the whole of the Geiranger community to be evacuated - a forlorn prospect with only two narrow roads out of the township.

The actual geography of the fjord is not explained in thorough detail, so that it appears relatively easy to move from where the monitoring station is (Åkerneset) to the area where the family lives, and in turn to Geiranger township itself; this may not be strictly accurate. However, the Åkerneset massif is in fact unstable, so the premise of the film is not fanciful.

The tsunami effect looks impressive as the 80 metre wave speeds along the fjord towards Geiranger, and its aftermath is suitably chaotic. The human drama follows some predictable turns in which dogged determination triumphs over physical devastation and acute personal danger. There are sobering scenes of destruction and loss of life, and some nerve-wracking battles with encroaching water and a diminishing air supply. From a purely realistic point of view, it is hard to know whether breath could be held quite so long underwater in such trying circumstances, or whether, after the tsunami had come and gone, there would be no ripple effect of returning (even if diminishing) waves, or whether in the resultant wreckage there would be quite so many small fires flickering, both inside and outside the hotel, to shed light on the action. But these are the acceptable conventions of disaster movies. 

On the other hand, the dangerous nature of the monitoring process is well illustrated as two of the station's geologists are stuck in the massif just as the rockfall starts, and the survivor is convincingly harrowed. Kristian's attempt to help a neighbour are commendable but prove lethal, while his wife Idun has to cope with a frightened teenager and a panic-stricken hotel guest in a conflict of interest that leaves her son if anything even more shaken than he already was. Though the final resolution is upbeat for the family, the costs are high.

I went to see the film primarily because I have stayed in Geiranger and was already aware of the geological problems there. It was interesting to see how a disaster movie was made out of a plausible possibility, and also of course to spot places that I recognised.