THE STORY – When a suicidal Inuk teen accidentally pierces an oil pipeline with a bullet, the FBI launches a full-scale manhunt across the northern wilderness.
THE CAST – Noomi Rapace, Leo Matthew Temela, Yin Wang, Zorga Qaunaq, Miali Buscemi & Joanassie Aupaluk
THE TEAM – Jaap van Heusden & Vinnie Karetak (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
There’s a moment early in “In Alaska” where Noomi Rapace’s FBI agent, Susan Tarheel, walks into 17-year-old Woody’s bedroom and places her hands on his belongings as if they’re communicating with her, building a picture of the boy she’s hunting through the objects he’s left behind. It’s the best kind of acting: silent and controlled, a performer letting us watch the gears turn. It’s also, frustratingly, the closest the film comes to giving Tarheel an interior life because directors Jaap van Heusden and Vinnie Karetak keep her thoughts almost entirely to themselves. We’re told late in the film that she’s battling depression, that she sees herself in Woody, and that this draws her toward mercy instead of procedure. But we’re told, not shown, and a film this interested in psychological wreckage needed to let us further into hers.
That gap between what “In Alaska” wants to say and what it actually earns onscreen defines the whole experience. The setup has real bite: Woody, a suicidal Inuit teenager in a middle-of-nowhere Alaskan village, walks into the wilderness planning to end his life, fires his rifle into the air out of rage when he can’t go through with it, and accidentally hits an oil pipeline. Now he’s a federal fugitive with the FBI treating a kid’s worst night as an act of ecoterrorism, in a plot point so overstated (a school project on the Amazon, his mother’s Muslim boyfriend, and apparently sufficient grounds for suspicion) that it undercuts a premise which didn’t need exaggerating to be devastating. A boy tried to die and instead became the most wanted man in the state. The film escalates this into conspiracy-thriller stakes with the federal task forces, terrorism panic, and a nationwide manhunt machinery that crowds out the more urgent story sitting underneath it: who Woody is, and why he wanted to die in the first place.
Leo Matthew Temela, a rapper from Kimmirut making his acting debut as Woody, carries the film’s rawest material well, even if unevenly at times. There’s real emptiness behind his eyes in the early ATV sequences, a blankness that doesn’t perform grief but is absent from it itself. The back half, when Woody crosses into Canada and finds his mother’s Inuit community, is where the film locates its actual subject: not the manhunt, but a boy relearning a language and lineage that generational trauma (his mother and grandmother stripped of both in residential schools) has already stolen from him once. This new beginning for him, discovering who he is, carries more weight than anything the FBI plot manages. It’s a shame the film treats this material as a detour rather than the center it clearly wants to be.
The direction is the film’s most consistent liability. Whenever “In Alaska” reaches for a dreamlike style to visualize Woody’s psychology, it stumbles. The visual language feels scattered rather than hallucinatory, closer to a movie tripping over its own ambitions than one in control of them. The editing doesn’t help, cutting between the vastness of the manhunt (roadblocks, drones, planes overhead making the landscape feel claustrophobic in an effective way) and Woody’s internal collapse without a clear rhythm connecting the two.
There’s a version of “In Alaska” that trusts its quieter half completely and lets the thriller mechanics recede – the version where Tarheel’s silence becomes eloquent instead of evasive, where Woody’s homecoming is the film rather than its epilogue. What’s here feels like a rougher draft of that film: a story with something urgent to say about intergenerational trauma and Inuit youth suicide, wrapped inside a genre chassis that keeps pulling focus from it.
