Thale — 4 GPPs

 
I had very high expectations for Thale when I saw the trailer for it many moons ago. It promised to be a high quality fantasy horror film from lovely Norway. It was actually very boring.

 The movie couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a tense horror-mystery or a creepy fantasy. The confusion of genres made it feel like it was trying to be too many good ideas all at once. In the final analysis it didn’t succeed as a horror or a fantasy film. In horror, I expect to see something scary besides myself nodding off in the mirror. In fantasy, I want to see more than a naked lady with a tail. The basic elements of both horror and fantasy were ultimately too thinly presented for me.

 [BEGIN SPOILERS]

The story is about a huldra secreted away by a benevolent mad scientist. The huldra was raised in a bunker for years when the main characters find her. The scientist was absent and the only artifact of his presence was the peculiar research materials he left behind. Most of the voice overs were from cassette tapes the scientist made while waxing affectionately of the little girl-creature in his cabin-shack-lab-thing.

This freaks out one of the main characters, Elvis. He quickly warms to her. His boss/friend/business-partner was inexplicably unmoved and nonplussed the entire film (until the last scene). He had cancer. That’s the big reveal for him. The huldra, Thale, cured him with her woodland folklore magic. This was after the Norwegian Men-in-Black came to, you know, ‘secure the package.’

And that’s it. That’s all. If I’m generous, this movie could have easily been a 14 minute short. There was maybe a total of five minutes of action in a film clocking in at 76 minutes. That’s a lot of yawning Ladies and Gentlemen. Another thing in great abundance, repetition. Elvis vomited a lot. I mean, I get it, he’s squeamish. A strange trait to have considering his job is cleaning up crime scenes and dead people. We see Thale’s tail a lot…vacuum-wrapped in plastic. Seriously, how many times do you have to show that? It’s like the director was doing the movie equivalent of writing a college paper with a page limit.

[END SPOILERS]

In short, Thale is boring. Unless you are writing a dissertation on depictions of Norwegian folklore in contemporary genre media, give it a pass.