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 now used to keep the pens clean. But in a bid to impress Japanese investors, owner Avaldsnes (Øyvind Brandtzæg) has cranked the tech up to the max, harshing the vibe not just for the wild salmon but the fjord’s deep denizen too.
Director Pål Øie subscribes both to fishing’s credos of patience and Jaws’s of maximising tension by keeping the apex predator out of sight for much of the film. The tentacled one is barely glimpsed for the first two-thirds, sucking a couple of idiot jetskiers down into a whirlpool in the prologue and then preferring to glide suggestively below the waterline. All the more space for the film to repetitively bludgeon home its moralistic nature-out-of-whack messaging: an old timer warning the fjord is no longer the same, crabs fleeing the waters en masse, grisly flotsam interrupting the capitalists’ champagne handshake.
When he finally turns up, the cephalopod reads from the same scorecard, sparing Avaldsnes’s whistleblower daughter Maria (Jenny Evensen), but not extending the same courtesy to the businessman. Øie dips into close-quarters horror at points – the scuttling bloodsuckers are straight out of Aliens – but generally keeps his film as fleet and breezy as the kraken’s roving arms. The characterisation is correspondingly lightweight, but Khorami has a calming, earth mother-type presence that renders this eco lecture-cum-rampage strangely palatable.