Tunnelen [The Tunnel] (2019)

(On Cable TV, August 2021) There’s something really interesting to see when typically American movie genres are taken up by filmmakers in other countries — the mixture of genre formulas with national sensibilities can be quirky by North American standards, and what works in a context can be a harder sell in others. So it is that The Tunnel hails from Norway and cleverly uses a distinctive national feature — its kilometres-long tunnels allowing for road traffic through the country’s numerous mountains—as backdrop for a pure catastrophe thriller. After a perfunctory but efficient opening sequence, the mayhem begins when a truck crashes deep inside a nine-kilometre-long tunnel. No problem — everyone just has to turn back and get out, right? Well, no: Even discounting the snowstorm holding back the rescue at one of the ends of the tunnel, it’s not quite so simple as driving out. Not only are the cars, buses and trucks stuck in the tunnel confident that things will get moving again and wait in place, the situation gets deadly when the crashed truck explodes, transforming the tunnel into a burning oxygen-free death zone. Stakes get personal when our protagonist (a wonderfully stoic Thorbjørn Harr) realizes that his daughter is in the tunnel, and the ensemble cast also gets involved in various ways. The American tradition of an escalating situation is obvious enough, although some will quibble that director Pål Øie starts slow and doesn’t quite build up neatly to an over-the-top finale. But the Norwegian touch is what makes the film special. Compared to the usual formula, The Tunnel often zigs and zags. There’s a loathsome supporting character who doesn’t get stuck in the tunnel, for instance — and whose dramatic arc is to appreciate that he’s not dead and neither is his son. There’s a goofy character in the first act who becomes a figure of grief by the end of the film. And then there’s the wonderfully restrained heroism of the coolly efficient Norwegian rescue workers as they confront the disaster with a minimum of histrionics, trying to make the best out of a fatal situation. Even for Canadian viewers used to the snow and the cold, there’s some exceptional exoticism out of something that has no equivalent here, and the support mechanisms that those tunnels require. I do have issues with bits and pieces of the conclusion, about how the film is sometimes very cold-blooded about its characters’ deaths, and how some obvious questions from non-Norwegians are not always answered very quickly. But it’s original enough to be worth a look for thrill-seekers open to unusual disasters in unusual places. Make it a triple feature with The Wave and The Quake for a strong dose of large-scale Norwegian disaster movies.