If this was the story of five strangers coming together to help each other overcome their fear of flying, it would have been a sorry premise for a feature movie. So director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson transported this flight of misfits, warts-and-all, to Iceland, and let them loose. And of course mayhem ensued: where’s the fun in not satisfying the viewers’ m-ice-maze schadenfreude?
Northern Comfort is a simple and lovable film. There isn’t a groundbreakingly complex truth that would only be revealed when the five protagonists’ tales are interwoven together. And only one of them has “a particular set of skills that was acquired over a very long career” – the veteran character actor Tim Spall plays the ex-commando-turned-famous-writer Edward. At the opposite spectrum sits Lydia Leonard’s Sarah and Simon Manyoda’s Charles, whose lives are fraying and cocooned, respectively. In between sits the superficially dysfunctional couple Coco (Gina Bramhill) and Alfons (Sverrir Gudnason), who teeter on the verge of splitting in opposite directions.
The trick in the writing is that every next turn is almost believable by itself, so it becomes all the more absurd that in the end, they all grow from the brief Icelandic experience and fly off in their separate ways for the better. Granted, some of these twists can seem odd, and the supporting cast are literally flattened characters that might as well have been props. But the film never strays from this recipe to indulge in a freefall of the Cabin-In-The-Woods trope. After all, how many protagonists would we want to see surreally disfigured in a world already too close to home?
And isn’t that just the way it is? Brief turning points, even if one degree at a time, will still forever alter life’s trajectories. Even a civil engineer working in fog-laden London may find herself upside-down in a volcanic snowbank with the “right” dice-throws – you just never know.