Synopsis: A marine biologist’s investigation into mysterious deaths at a remote Norwegian fish farm uncovers a colossal, ancient sea creature awakened in the depths, one that now threatens to destroy the entire fjord.
Stars: Sara Khorami, Mikkel Bratt Silset, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Øyvind Brandtzæg, Jenny Evensen
Director: Pål Øie
Rated: NR
Running Length: 100 minutes
Movie Review in Brief:Norway’s Kraken is a handsome, straight-faced creature feature that cares about its people as much as its monster. A patient build and travelogue fjord views win out over a messy CGI finale. An easy recommend for genre fans, streaming now on VOD.
Kraken Review: A Monster With a View
I have watched a lot of bad creature features lately. Not the fun kind of bad. Just bad. So forgive me if this Kraken review reads like a man stumbling out of the desert toward a glass of water. Norway’s Kraken is no masterpiece, but it’s made with care, played straight, and shot like a travel brochure that happens to have a giant tentacled thing lurking in the corner. After all the cheap shark knockoffs I’ve suffered through, that counts for plenty.
The Scandinavians keep proving they take this stuff more seriously than most of us do. Their monsters arrive wrapped in folklore. Their towns feel real. Their landscapes do half the acting. Kraken leans on all three. And the result is an entertaining diversion you won’t be groaning over.
Salmon, Sonar, and a Very Bad Idea
Marine researcher Johanne (Sara Khorami) gets sent to a fish farm deep in a Norwegian fjord, where the salmon have started to act strangely. The gear keeps failing, the fish have started launching themselves out of the water, and longtime locals murmur about something from long ago in the dark water below. The company Johanne is visiting has a pest problem: salmon lice. Its fix is a gadget called Sonic Lice, sonar tuned to a frequency that drives the lice wild and sends them packing while the fish stay calm. I know. It’s absurd. Try not to laugh. The movie mostly doesn’t either, and that straight face is its secret weapon.
Because one monster is never enough in these things, there’s also a human villain, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s chasing money and real estate. (Why is it always real estate?) The company demos its Sonic Lice fix with an animated cartoon that won’t be putting Pixar out of business, then keeps cranking the frequency past safe levels to land a big buyer. Soon the salmon are flopping dead, fish are beaching themselves to dodge the menu, and the crabs are crawling out of the fjord en masse, heading off toward calmer water.
Of course, the sonar wakes something that’s been dozing on the seabed for ages. Two teenagers turn up dead, and the damage to their bodies dwarfs any normal predator. When large parasites begin to surface, suggesting they’re part of a much larger organism, Johanne starts tying the old legend of the fjord to the body count. It’s pure old-school monster movie, and it knows exactly what it is.
The Cast Sells the Stakes
These foreign creature features live or die on whether we can latch onto faces we don’t know yet. Khorami makes it easy. She isn’t the usual horror lead, which is why she lands. She’s watchful and smart, asks the right questions, trusts her gut, and the actress seems wired the same way. She takes Johanne from meek to mighty in about fifty minutes, sidestepping most of the genre’s tired traps. One gratuitous bit of nudity has no business being here, and the film is better every minute it forgets about it.
Mikkel Bratt Silset plays her former partner in life and research, and he’s the soft spot. The character is inert, and the actor doesn’t do much to rouse him. At one point someone commandeers his boat for a dangerous run and he just yells “Don’t!” and lets it go, looking faintly relieved. Øyvind Brandtzæg fares better as the smarmy suit chasing his salmon deal at any cost, the greed-blind type who only flinches once his own family is in the water. Jenny Evensen is the real find as his eco-minded daughter, spirited and tough to predict.
A Fjord Worth the Price of Admission
Cinematographer Sjur Aarthun, who also cut the film, shoots the fjord like a love letter. The camera glides across the water and threads the cliffs so often that I kept wishing I’d caught this on IMAX, even a bleary 11 a.m. show. Roy Westad’s score holds the mood without tipping into self-aware, grandiose parody. Production designer Kari Kankaanpää and the art team build a town cozy enough that a towering deep-sea menace feels like a true violation of the peace.
The effects should also get their due for doing a lot with their limitations. Visual effects supervisors Theodor Groeneboom and Alexander Kadim, with the Varg Studios crew, handle the digital side, while practical-effects leads Fredrik and Ole Marius Røttingen do the hands-on builds. Most of it works. The creature stays hidden a long while, doled out in pieces, which is the smart play. The finale runs past its welcome and melts into a blurry digital scrum where you can sort of see what’s been causing the chaos, and sort of can’t. Up to there, the patience pays off.
Worth Surfacing For
I might be grading on a curve bent by all the junk I’ve waded through, but I don’t think so. Much like 2013’s Ragnarok, there’s a seriousness the Scandinavians bring to this subgenre that even bigger U.S. productions rarely match. A lot of it comes down to mythology. Kraken isn’t out to teach you the legend, yet its story is tied so tightly to that coastline that it feels specific and worth your time. (Odd footnote: a second, completely unrelated 2026 film also called Kraken has its own giant tentacled beast but runs nearly forty minutes longer. Both directors swear it’s coincidence.)
The script has holes. Characters fret over a discovery one minute and tuck into lunch the next, like the scene before never happened, and I’d bet a longer cut exists somewhere that either ran out of effects money or got trimmed for pace. The connective tissue is thin. Even so, the big pieces lock together, and you can tell someone mapped this out before the cameras rolled. It also pulls its punches, trading a gory Deep Blue Sea munch-fest for something closer to Jurassic Park. Set in that idyllic fjord, the restraint somehow fits.
Lice, Camera, Action
Listen. It flew by. It’s pretty. It cares about its people as much as its monster, and someone took the time to build real effects instead of phoning them in. For creature-feature fans, that’s an easy recommendation, and if you count yourself among the faithful, you’ve sat through far worse without a view like this to keep you company. The theatrical run was a blink. It’s on VOD now. Dive in.
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