Elliott Crosset Hove in Godland (Janus Films)

When an overconfident young Danish priest is sent to Iceland on a church-building mission, his belief in God might not be enough to mentally and physically sustain him in Hlynur Pálmason’s character study that feels more like a slow-burn thriller.

In the 1890s, Lucas (played by Elliott Crosset Hove, whose face impressively morphs from stoic to agonized) travels on horseback to a remote part of Iceland—then a territory of Denmark—to build a church as well as photograph the landscape and the people he encounters. Sure that his status as a clergyman will be respected, he ignores the advice of his Icelandic guide, the much older Ragnar (played with weather-beaten ferocity by Ingvar Sigurðsson), who warns him not to cross a river at such a dangerous point: Lucas ends up not only losing the large cross one of the horses is carrying, but his reliable translator is swept away by the fast current and drowns.

Since Lucas only speaks Danish, he is often at a loss when he tries to communicate with the largely uncomprehending local folk, including Ragnar. After his translator dies, Lucas takes ill and almost succumbs himself, but Ragnar’s literally drags him on a stretcher the rest of the way. Once Lucas and his party reach the small village where the priest is to build a church, he is nursed back to health by the kindly farmer and widower Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters: the eldest, Anna (the guileless Vic Carmen Sonne), and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, the director’s daughter).

The austere setting of the Icelandic tundra gives Godland the visual trappings of a man vs. nature story, which is beautifully shot by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, who catches the complicated wonders of nature in striking shots of the various kinds of colorful vegetation and changing landscapes, including an active (and quite symbolic) volcano spewing lava and gas. However, Pálmason’s film is more complex than that.

By shooting in the nearly square 1.33:1 aspect ratio (with rounded corners that give the images a distant, dated look), Pálmason and Hausswolff hint at Lucas’s closemindedness, how small his world really is in spite of his faith in God and the expansiveness of the country surrounding him. After his translator’s death (which he caused), he must rely on the few locals who speak Danish—and luckily for him, Carl and his daughters are also from Denmark. But his inability to adapt to his new locale ends up slowly breaking his will and putting his very faith to the test.

Like Terrence Malick in The Tree of Life or A Hidden Life, Pálmason places Lucas’s travails in the greater context of the natural world, which moves at a glacial pace, even compared to the slowness of life in rural Iceland. Godland apes nature by taking its time to tell Lucas’s story, meandering through such odd sequences as wrestling matches between the local men, which the priest himself reluctantly, then enthusiastically, partakes in.

There’s a stunning shot early on of the translator’s body being reclaimed by the waters he was fished out of after his drowning, as waves slowly disintegrate the hurried—and shallow—grave that had been made. Similarly, later on, a succession of quick dissolves captures the body of Lucas’s dead horse in varying states of decomposition, until the surrounding vegetation swallows it up. A final sequence of teenage Ida coming upon the spot where her father and Lucas have a fateful confrontation brilliantly underscores the film’s unsettling theme of humanity’s time on the earth being rather fleeting in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t matter whether one is close to God or not.