Kraken review – fjord-based rampage is monster movie with environmental message

Underwater beastie shows discerning moral judgment when picking off victims in this fun Norwegian action film As Greta Thunberg demonstrates, an eco-chastising feels somehow cleansing when it comes out of Scandinavia. Maybe it’s because of the idea that people there live in greater harmony with nature. It is splendidly showcased in the shape of Norway’s Sognefjord, the country’s largest fjord, in this didactic but still-enjoyable action film. Kraken could almost serve as an extended tourist promo – other than the titular beastie that is, slewing off giant crab-like lice, and emerging from the depths to administer a stern 90-minute ticking-off about tampering with nature. Marine researcher Johanne (Sara Khorami, cementing her Norwegian creature-feature credentials after Troll 2 ) is summoned to the Sognefjord after reports of mass salmon strandings. Her first port of call is the local fish farm run by Erik (Mikkel Bratt Silset), an old flame with whom she developed sonic delousing pods ...

‘Life can be complicated’: Rachel Weisz on balancing privacy with stardom

Her latest TV series calls for her to play both twins in a reworking of Cronenberg’s dark and bloody classic, Dead Ringers. But Rachel Weisz, the famously private Oscar-winner, is used to stepping in and out of roles

There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.

In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.

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