Review: ‘Kraken’ Goes Full Spielberg, for Better or Worse

There was a discussion online a few weeks ago about Obsession and Backrooms, namely with regard to how this generation’s filmmakers use other filmmakers as a point of reference almost exclusively. Instead of culling from literature, art, poetry, and other media, their homage is strictly cinematic, and the result is reductive cinema in conversation with only cinema. I thought of that discourse a lot while watching Kraken, the latest from Norwegian filmmaker Pål Øie. It’s a serviceable monster movie, though it’s frustratingly indebted to Steven Spielberg’s biggest blockbusters.

Johanne (Sara Khorami), a marine biologist, is commissioned to investigate a fish farm in her hometown. The owner, Avaldsnes (Øyvind Brandtzæg), is in the midst of impressing Japanese investors with his farm’s latest technology—underwater sonic devices intended to remove parasitic lice from salmon. Johanne and her ex-flame, Erik (Mikkel Bratt Silset), developed the technology together, though she fled town before the device was operational, and Erik saw it through to the finish line.

There’s a strong environmental bent, and like every monster movie post-Jaws, Kraken is hesitant to say (or show) too much about its monster. The first hour, save for a few off-screen deaths, is largely Johanne’s procedural inquiry into the salmon farm and the disastrous consequences of blasting underwater sonic waves in a delicate fjord marine ecosystem. Kraken does fare better than most in its patience, largely because the environmental investigation is moderately compelling, and both Johanne and Erik are, well, adults, free from the kind of blockbuster quips we see often in American movies.