3.5/5 stars A film that will chill you to the bone, Against the Ice is a passion project for co-writer and star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Playing in a Special Gala presentation at the Berlin International Film Festival before it appears on Netflix in early March, the film sees the former Game of Thrones actor take centre stage in this true story. Coster-Waldau plays Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen, a Danish explorer who led an expedition in 1909 to northeastern Greenland in the Arctic. The mission was designed to find incontrovertible evidence that the mostly ice-covered country was not split in two, and thereby dispute a United States territorial claim to part of it. Mikkelsen’s men were preceded, two years earlier, by another group, known as The Danish Expedition, which ended in fatalities, the explorers never returning home. Mikkelsen’s trip is part (unlikely) rescue mission, but the treacherous conditions mean only he and one other can take their sleds across the ice, while the rest of the crew remain with the boat, the Alabama. Volunteering to go with him is ex-Navy mechanic Iver Iverson ( Gangs of London star Joe Cole), an upbeat fellow who perhaps doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for. Disaster strikes early when Iver accidentally loses control of one of the sleds, losing vital supplies and – crushingly – his lead dog, Bjorn, in a terrifyingly vertiginous sequence, brilliantly realised by director Peter Flinth and his team. The more it unfolds, the more you marvel at man’s capacity for endurance. As the captions incrementally catalogue the insane number of days these two spend with just each other, food dwindles and dogs keel over and die from exhaustion in the Arctic conditions. You’ll feel every step trudged in a film that is utterly draining to watch. There’s a shocking sequence reminiscent of The Revenant (although unfortunately, slightly let down by the CGI in places), and unsurprisingly, as weeks turn to months, madness and hallucinations set in. Adapted by Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick from Mikkelsen’s book Two Against the Ice , in many ways it’s a conventional survival drama. The language feels a little too contemporary at times (compare it to Robert Eggers’ linguistically accurate The Lighthouse , which also deals with two men battling to stay sane), and the English accents spoken by these Danish characters also grate a little. But the gripes aren’t enough to derail a story that sucks you in deep. With a heroic effort from the leads, dwarfed by the vast expanses in Greenland and Iceland, where they filmed, the result is a worthy tribute to these two intrepid explorers. Against the Ice will start streaming on Netflix on March 2. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook