(courtesy IMDb)
Being afraid of something comes with the territory of being alive.
Whether it’s an evolutionary response or simply an existential stress reaction to being human where, despite all the trappings of civilisation, there’s a lot to be afraid of, human beings tend to get anxious and afraid a lot.
Many of us refuse to be victims of those fears, pervasively corrosive though they may be, and so, like the poor, hapless souls in the hilariously meaningful farce that is Northern Comfort, the English language debut of Icelandic director, Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, we face the fears that ail us head on, determined to not let them get the best of us.
Noble intentions all but as Sarah (Lydia Leonard), Edward (Timothy Spall) and Coco (Ella Rumpf) & Alphons (Sverrir Gudnason discover during their Fearless Flyers course, what we aim for and what we gert are not always the same thing.
Paralysed by thoughts of birds flying into plane engines and the shuddering and noisy roiling that comes with turbulence, these four tremulously intrepid souls – three really; Coco, a vapid influencer who’s humorously un-self aware and captive to utterances that sound thoughtful but which utterly mean little to nothing, is only there, as she tells everyone, to support Alphons – hope that the course will get them up in the air without rampant fear and anxiety, leaving them ready to make the most of their lives.
Sarah is the most invested with her newish but blossoming relationship with divorced dad Tom (Emun Elliot) signalling a new hopeful chapter in her life, one she wants to make the most of it on an upcoming trip to Cape Verde which will require, you guessed it, a flight across water.
She’s hoping that the final part of the course, a three-hour flight to Iceland and back, will prove she has finally conquered her fear of flying and that all the things holding her back will fall away as she and Tom cement the close bonds already well and truly forming.
That’s the plan, of course, but as with some many things in this weirdly but welcomingly funny which ducks and weaves and subverts expectations at every gloriously unhinged turn, tings don’t quite go to plan.
For a start, the course leader who’s all calming purpose and resolute reassurance has to pull out at the last minute and she’s replaced by Charles (Simon Manyonda), an obviously nervous and timid wannabe leader who finds it hard to stop his charges going off and doing their own thing.
While he loses four of the six course members before they even make it on the flight, he manages to shepherd Sarah, an engineer, Edward, a famous author, and Alphons, an app developer and Coco onto the flight which initially, some initially buffeting aside, seems to go really well.
Until, naturally enough, it doesn’t and some extreme rattling and shaking see the course members arrive at the airport in Iceland feeling rather worse for wear after what Coco calls rather dramatically, with that weird familiarity and emotional intimacy known only to influencers who act if they have met all their followers in person and at length, a “near-death experience”.
Not what quite Fearless Flyers had in mind, and unable to think beyond corporate policy, Charles isn’t sure what to do to reassure them, despite some awkwardly inappropriate encouragements to calm down by thinking of how good they felt having sex, and as he flounders in his leadership role things go manically off course in ways that are extravagantly over the top, laugh-out-loud, ridiculous.
It’s at this point that Sigurðsson, who also penned the screenplay with Halldór Laxness Halldórsson and Tobias Munthe, could have simply flicked the switch to total chaotic hilarity but instead, while some very madcap and even darkly unsettling things take place, he manages to keep the humanity at the heart of Northern Comfort intact, especially when it comes to Sarah who, for reasons best left to the watching of this riotously funny film, is desperate to find her way to Tom’s side.
What makes Northern Comfort so enjoyable to watch is the way it mixes the ridiculous with the emotionally meaningful, getting to the heart of why these frightened flyers are willing to face their fears and how, in ways they don’t even remotely see coming, manage to do just that, in spite of rather than because of the efforts of Charles, who it could well be argued, ends up way worse off than his anxious charges by film’s end.
It’s the film’s ability to keep an affecting focus on what’s happening to its main characters, particularly Sarah who is the emotional core of Northern Comfort, that really makes some of the more outlandishly darkly comedic moments really work.
Without that focus, many of the scenes, especially the ones where the Fearless flyers end up all losing it considerably at a luxury wellness hotel near the airport – though it might as well be on the moon with a raging snowstorm making travel problematic at best, dangerous at worst – would have seemed madly too extreme, exercises in farce run amuck that are all comedic insanity and no substance.
But anchored by the innate humanity of people like Sarah, which Northern Comfort devotes the necessary time to establish at someone who exists well outside the course, the film, to use an aviatory piece of parlance, soars, serving up broodingly frenetic laughs that impact way beyond the tickling of your oft-triggered funny bone.
Filmed with tight, almost claustrophobic cinematography which visually conveys the intensity of the moods of all the course participants and their supposed but wildly ineffectual leader who shares some moments with Edward which turn the dial up to darkly manic but which still somehow seem funny, Northern Comfort is a very entertaining film which goes massively off course pretty much throughout but in ways that, apart from keeping you laughing with a welcome regularity, really hit home to anyone trying to slay their demons and finding its so much harder and challenging than they ever thought.