The Arctic region has the same place in the Scandinavian mind as the Wild West does in the American mind—and parallels may be drawn between the Norwegian adventure movie Zero Kelvin and certain great Westerns—but this film has its own special tension. Gard Eisvold is a restless, poor young writer living in Oslo who decides to get a little more worldly by joining an Arctic fur-trapping expedition. Leaving behind his girlfriend, Eisvold travels to Greenland, where he's confronted with the dual harshness of the elements and his profane station-captain, played with brilliant malevolence by the great Stellan Skårsgard. The captain doesn't take kindly to having a violin-playing, poetry-writing college boy around the cabin, and he begins to torture Eisvold in a cunning if none too subtle fashion. Soon, of course, they're at each other's throats despite each needing the other's help to survive the wilderness. Beautifully paced and gorgeously shot, the overwhelming presence of natural cold, desolation and cruelty in Zero Kelvin ideally offsets the hellbound spiral of peacemaking and betrayal, and helps make this film a truly great psychological thriller.