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The wind deserves above-the-title billing in “Growth of the Soil” — even in the most serene scenes of Hans Petter Moland’s muscular period epic, you can hear it rattling and wheezing and moaning away in the background,
or at the very least, you think you can. The elements are crucial characters in this saga of a naïve young couple building a homestead from the ground up in early 20th-century Norway, especially at the outset, where there’s nothing to separate our human protagonists from their battering impact; before they can live off the land, they must live on the land, and surviving it is no guarantee. But it’s not long before this wild, unyielding country is harnessed by progress and gentrification: In the sturdy, sweeping mold of films like “The Emigrants,” “Growth of the Soil” charts the growth of a people via that of a household.
Stately and pleasingly old-fashioned, “Growth of the Soil” plays to the strengths of Moland, a reliable, unflashy journeyman best known internationally for his various collaborations with Stellan Skarsgård, among them the thriller “In Order of Disappearance” (which he remade, with Liam Neeson, as “Cold Pursuit”) and, more pertinently, “Out Stealing Horses,” another decades-spanning literary with a stirring romantic heft to it. (Like that film, Moland’s latest has been selected as Norway’s international Oscar submission.) Minus a crossover star on the level of Skarsgård, this Toronto premiere might not travel as widely as those films, but it should benefit from the rising international profile of its charismatic leading man Herbert Nordrum, the “Worst Person in the World” breakout soon to be seen in English-language productions “Sense and Sensibility” and “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me.”
It was in the excellent but underseen 2023 black comedy “The Hypnosis” that Nordrum really showed his capabilities, winning Best Actor at the Karlovy Vary fest for his flustered but tightly controlled performance as one half of a flailing couple at a startup convention. That film rode on his agitated comic chemistry with Swedish actress Asta Kamma August, so it’s an inspired move to reteam them as lovers with far more visceral problems to deal with in “Growth of the Soil.” This film may bind them together with a shared burden of tragedy, but the actors are once more closely, urgently keyed into each other.
Isak (Nordrum) and Inger (August) meet as strangers mutually wandering the harsh mountainscapes of untamed northern Norway, swiftly bonding for warmth and companionship as the bitter snowfall comes. We learn little of their respective pasts, while for both, the future is a blank slate: If fate has lumped them together, then they’re not going to argue with that. Isak is stoic and practical, seeking to carve himself a place in this still-unclaimed land; Inger, whose cleft palate has left her feeling alienated from the outside world, finally feels accepted enough to carve it with him. As we cycle through the seasons, their setup evolves from a temporary structure to a handbuilt stone house to a thriving farm shared with their two strapping sons.
As a peripheral community grows around them, this lawless terrain is suddenly subject to boundaries and contracts and taxes; both uneducated and illiterate, Isak and Inger are ill prepared for such societal evolution. But their primitive way of living reveals itself to rather more devastating effect when their third child is born, and Inger commits an act of unthinkable desperation. From this point on, the couple’s devoted, almost hermetically sealed-off life together is irretrievably shattered, and the outside world intrudes in ways both progressive and ruinous.
Co-written by Moland and Gard B. Eidsvold, “Growth of the Soil” is adapted from a two-volume 1917 novel by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, and the film honors that literary formality and sweep. At a very full 155 minutes, it’s stately but engrossing, enlivened by the detailed, slow-burning interior transformations unfolding in both lead performances — not to mention some vital external changes too.
It’s an interesting side note that August is the daughter of “Pelle the Conqueror” director Bille; “Growth of the Soil” feels like the kind of film he might have made in his heyday, when such rustic arthouse epics were bigger business. Shot with rugged austerity rather than overly pictorial prettiness by Oskar Dahlsbakken, with that scratching, howling sound design at least as prominent as the musical score, this is a slightly more sober version of those, but transportive nonetheless.
