THE LAST KING (2016)

Directed by Niles Gaup, Starring: Kristofer Hivju, Jakob Oftebro. Action, Historical Drama. Norway, 2016, 96mins, Cert 15.

 

“An innocent boy today, our mightiest foe tomorrow”.

Norway: 1204. The throne is held by the Birkebeinerne king. However all is not well in the kingdom, and the rival Baglers, with the support of Denmark, are launching an attack upon the Birkebeinernes and hatching a plot to kill the king. Therefore, the king’s rightful heir - a baby born in secrecy out of wedlock - must be protected at all costs otherwise the royal bloodline will be severed and the Baglers will take the throne. 

Norwegian director Nile Gaup’s returns to the realm of historical drama he first mined to great acclaim with PATHFINDER (1987) (a film set around the year 1000AD). This time around he’s fast-forwarded 200 years to deliver a rollicking GAME OF THRONES like tale (minus the dragons) in which winter isn’t just coming, it’s already here. 

Against a sweeping widescreen snow covered landscape, the machinations of Norwegian civil war play out with neither women nor children safe from the marauding Baglers as they ruthlessly hunt down the king’s illegitimate son. Fleeing on skis, warrior Torstein (Kristofer Hivju (GAME OF THRONES, THE THING 2011) and his magnificent ginger beard, together with family man Skjervald (Jakob Oftebro) and his perfectly respectable but more modest beard, are forced to protect the infant across treacherous icy terrain.

The narrative toboggans along at a cracking pace, with the constant pursuit of the Baglers never more than an arrow or a bludgeoning axe away. 

Both Hivju and Oftebro are excellent in their respective roles, and you find yourself genuinely rooting for the two frosty musketeers and their little innocent infant upon whom the future of Norway relies. You’ve gotta love Hivju’s hard-as-nails-heart-of-gold Torstein, lying on a bed of straw waiting to have his chest cut open to remove an embedded arrow head, growls at his impromptu farmer surgeon: “If I die...I’m going to kill you”.

Battle are swift, brutal, occasionally bloody, and efficiently staged using a modest numbers of stuntmen and extras as (presumably) the budget allowed rather than Hollywood level legions of CGI regiments which wouldn’t deliver the gritty bone-crunching intimacy conveyed here. 

There’s a quote during the film’s end credits from an Icelandic writer named Halldor Laxness which reads: “The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies and imagines he is telling the truth”. I cannot vouch for the historical accuracy of THE LAST KING, but I can however testify to its engaging thrusting Nordic storytelling. And any film where a man appears to be playing music by plucking his beard like a hirsute harp and a princess is played by an actress named Thea Sofie Loch Næss gets two thumbs-up from me.

****(out of 5*)

Paul Worts