In the Soil is one of those films without a lot of dialogue and without a lot of action. But you’re immediately hooked. As I watched this film, I slowly began to figure out what was going on. But I still could not believe it was actually happening. The answer was right there in front of me, but my mind still refused to accept it. There are hints: is that really a face? You might find yourself wondering.
There are only two characters in this film. Sandra Guldberg Kampp plays Karoline. She lives on a dark gloomy property on the sea in what appears to be rural Denmark. Her house is dark. There are few lights, and what lights there are somehow make the house appear even darker Karoline spends her time listening to a device that looks like a Sony Walkman, circa 1990. She does’t seem to have much to do.
Her father Kjeld, on the other hand, is quite busy. Kjeld is played superbly by Thomas Guldberg Madsen. On the edge of the sea a giant unnerving tree with innumerable tangled branches reaching to the sky. It looks like some sort of foreboding monument to the sparseness and lonely damp of the land. His facial expressions are constantly intriguing. At one moment he seems full of menace and foreboding, and at another, he seems like a kindly older man puttering about his garden. But we are put on guard when we see him in a room lit only be a red fluorescent light handling various sinister looking tools.
But what he is busy doing is digging a deep hole in the ground. Why is he doing this? Who knows. He tries to enlist his daughter’s help, but is only marginally successful. She’s distressed, but again, we don’t know why. Are they digging up her dead mother? Are they digging a grave? Is something buried down there?
So what is this film really about? We can take a hint from the title. What exactly is in the soil? At certain points, as I mentioned above, there seem to be frightening faces lurking in the dirt. And Kjeld is working away with the fervour of a man possessed. My guess is that he is acting under the orders of some dark, chthonic god who inhabits the windswept plains of this remote location. What it really made me wonder about was the relationship between a country’s landscape and its peoples’ beliefs. Do Northern peoples tend to have dark, bloodthirsty gods who offer only bleak and cold comfort to their adherents? Did something about Jesus’ bloody end appeal to these people?
In The Venerable Bede’s 7th work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he describes trying to convert the native inhabitants of England to Christianity. One group decides that Jesus offers an attractive alternative to their own beliefs, which present life as being like a bird who flies into one end of a banquet hall on a wintry night, is warm for a few moments, and then flies out the other end. What there is before we are born and after are unknown. There seems to be something akin to this grim belief system that pervades In the Soil. It’s tone is similarly earthy, dark and hopeless.
The director has done a marvellous job here. The photography alone is worth the admission. The drab landscape is alive with terror. With its palette of greys, browns and black, we can feel the damp cool air and the moist soil right through the screen. There are little touches, like a tiny bit of blood that Kjeld leaves behind on a nail. The music is similarly powerful. It is sparse for the most part, with louder moments of a lurching, groaning orchestra, with bows bouncing off strings in a demented way.
Casper Rudolf Emil Kjeldsen had made several shorts, all dealing with the grotesque and the bizarre. I would say the closest director in terms of tone is Yorgos Lanthimos, although without as much overt humour. All in all, however, I will be waiting with baited breath for his first feature length project.
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