After two decades ruled by blockbusters and masked avengers, the theatrical market turned 2020, thanks to COVID-19, into a year without big screen superheroes. André Øvredal’s Mortal might have been the movie to fill that void. Unfortunately, a threadbare story and even blander characters undermine its spectacle.
Øvredal has tackled scary stories, troll hunting and eerie autopsies before, and with Mortal, he delivers a dreary blast of fantasy action. Shaggy and wounded, Eric (Nat Wolff) trudges through the Norwegian woods, severely burned and grimly surviving in the wake of a mysterious fire. After an encounter with rowdy teens leads to an accidental death and arrest, Mortal begins to tip its hand as a small-scale superpowered drama in the vein of Chronicle, tinged with shades of a more fantastical nature. Uncanny happenings send Eric on the run, alongside an ally in psychologist Christine (Iben Akerlie); the duo are drawn towards a mysterious fate while sinister forces pursue.
Or rather, the fate would be mysterious if Mortal wasn’t completely unsubtle about Eric’s powers over flames and lightning. Eric mentioning visions of a towering tree will likely alert those with knowledge of the region’s mythology (or of a certain popular franchise). At least the effects showcasing those abilities are impressive effects-driven set-pieces, melting rooms with blazing heat or raining arcs of electricity upon a storm-battered bridge. Such sequences are sparsely placed among the film’s duration, since Mortal treats those displays of power as an unnatural enigma rather than a superheroic origin.
With the mystery behind Eric’s powers not particularly mysterious, perhaps Mortal’s plot and characters could supplement it? Alas, the storytelling is as bland as the film’s attempt at world-building and reveals. Most of our time is spent with Eric and Christine during their road trip across Norway, and neither performance has the chemistry or personality to maintain interest. Mortal unfolds with all the momentum of narrative bullet-points, attempting to draw emotion and drama from a plot that barely has time for either before moving onto the next scene. The government forces in Eric’s wake could be any aggressive agency from Firestarter or The Fury or any number of similar stories; as a threat, they’re negligible, a convenient exposition mouthpiece with vague evil motivations. Despite its intriguing first act, Mortal only amounts to overly familiar genre fare and YA-fiction tropes given a mythic spark. Look past its few sequences of elemental powers, and you’ll find concepts done with more nuance, flair, and intrigue in films like Midnight Special, Fast Color or last year’s Code 8.
Then, just when Mortal seems to reach a climactic peak and fateful confrontation…it ends. It’s a bombastic whimper of a conclusion, so abrupt that the story continues in voice-over, reducing the entire film to a jarringly-incomplete first act. One could assume those voice-over clips are meant to be sequel teasers, but listen closely, because they’re about the only satisfying pay-off and conclusion that Mortal offers for its own plot.
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