THE STORY – On the isolated Faroe Islands of 1862, a forbidden love between a fisherman and a whaler survives tragedy and death, unleashing mystical forces to battle against an entire village.
THE CAST – Egor Venned, Pilou Asbæk & Sofia Nolsøe
THE TEAM – Kasper Kalle (Director/Writer) & Rasmus Birch (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
There’s a dark, foreboding score threading through the opening shots of “No Rest for the Wicked,” circling the shadowed cliffs of the Faroe Islands as waves batter the rock below. It’s an overture that tells you exactly what kind of film you’re about to watch: something that lives in the tension between beauty and menace, isolation and intimacy. Director Kasper Kalle, working from a script he co-wrote with Rasmus Birch, adapts a little-known 1884 short story named “Manor” by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German writer and early queer icon whose work is considered one of the first unflinching depictions of gay love in literature, a cornerstone few people know exists. Kalle has spoken about growing up gay in a small town, an isolation he said felt like living on a remote island. That personal history is all over this film, which uses horror as the language for feelings that religious and social shame never let its characters name outright.
Having its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, the film’s setup is simple and effective. Baldur (Egor Venned), a quiet young fisherman with a scarred cheek living with his mother on an isolated, deeply religious stretch of the islands, gets lost in a rolling fog while out on the water; the sound design here is excellent, disorienting in exactly the right way as he nearly runs his boat into the surrounding rock. He hears cries for help: another man, a Dane named Helge (Pilou Asbæk), who has lost his oar in the current. In the chaos of the rescue, Baldur is knocked unconscious and loses his boat; Helge saves him, and the two men, unable to fully understand each other’s language, are pulled into each other’s orbit almost by accident.
What follows is a slow-building, well-observed relationship disguised as reluctant hospitality. Baldur’s mother (Sofia Nolsøe) welcomes Helge warmly, knitting him mittens, while Baldur himself keeps up a performance of irritation, but there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth that gives him away every time. He hasn’t had a close bond with another man since his fisherman father died, and Helge’s presence clearly unsettles something in him he doesn’t have language for. The film finds some of its best beats in stolen glances across the pews at church, giddy and boyish, the kind of look two people give each other when they both already know, and neither will say it first.
The writing is at its smartest when it lets its two leads communicate beyond language rather than through it. A scene where Baldur asks Helge to describe trees – the treeless islands have left him unfamiliar with them – becomes a quietly moving stand-in for a much more dangerous conversation. Some are rough, some are smooth. “A bit like a man’s face,” Helge says. It’s a small piece of writing that does a lot of work, using the language of nature to describe the two men to each other, and it’s the clearest insight the film offers, rather than saying anything outright.
The physical filmmaking matches that patience. Clothes off by the water, a wrestling match in the cold ocean that turns into something else entirely once the camera drops beneath the surface, letting the two men actually look at each other; it’s a genuinely lovely sequence. A nightmare Baldur has of Helge’s hand in his mouth reads as the film’s clearest gesture toward the religious shame simmering under the story, guilt manifesting somewhere the conscious mind can’t fully censor it.
Where the film earns real credit is in refusing to manufacture conflict between the two men. The threat here isn’t jealousy, betrayal, or internalized homophobia; it’s the shape of their lives. Helge is a whaler, restless by nature, bound to leave when the next ship comes. And there’s something genuinely sweet in how happy he is at the thought that Baldur might join him. Baldur’s mother, meanwhile, isn’t shy about her fear of being left behind in poverty, and accuses Helge of filling her son’s head with ideas of a bigger world. It’s a real, human tug-of-war between obligation and want; what you feel versus what you feel you owe.
The film crafts a specific tenderness of its central romance, built from silence and small gestures rather than declarations. But if there’s any flaw here, it’s that the film doesn’t give Baldur and Helge quite enough time together before everything changes and Helge leaves. Their bond is drawn with real specificity, but it’s set up and then upended so quickly that the devastation which follows doesn’t hit as hard as it should. Even an extra ten minutes could have done wonders, giving these two a little more room to live in their dynamic before the plot shifts into horror mode.
The horror elements get their start with a storm, loud and immersive enough that the sound work alone is terrifying, and everything that follows changes the shape of the film. Without spoiling how it gets there, “No Rest for the Wicked” pivots into spiritual ghost-story territory, as the same fog that first brought Helge into Baldur’s life becomes the thing that returns him, in a form that isn’t quite right anymore. It’s a smart, literal way of dramatizing grief and haunting: the people who leave the deepest marks on us don’t really leave. And horror turns out to be exactly the right vocabulary for a story like this one; a story about desire that couldn’t be spoken aloud in 1862, in a community that had no framework for it except sin. When a feeling has never been allowed a name, it doesn’t just disappear; it goes looking for other shapes to take.
Through grief, longing, and love that outlives the person it was for, the film lets all of it evolve into something quite powerful. The horror isn’t an add-on grafted onto a love story: it’s what love and loss actually look like once they’ve been buried for long enough. Some of the imagery it reaches for along the way, as it explores sin, evil, and ostracization, will read as familiar to anyone versed in how queerness has historically been coded in horror, or even in other genres. But given that this is adapted from a story written in 1884 by one of the earliest openly gay writers on record, that vocabulary isn’t a shortcut so much as a document of the era it’s drawing from; the film is working inside the very language its characters would have inherited, not reaching for it out of laziness.
What “No Rest for the Wicked” ultimately understands is that nature and desire are the same force wearing different names. The Faroe Islands themselves make that case: their cliffs and currents can’t be reasoned with or held back, and the film keeps insisting that what grows between Baldur and Helge is made of the same stuff. Sexuality here is as untamable as the sea and just as capable of drowning the people who try to stand against it. That makes the film’s horror elements feel earned rather than punitive, and its final note lands with conviction: the dread comes not from the love itself, but from everyone around it who mistakes something unstoppable for something evil.
