29/01/2024 - Ulaa Salim offers a surprising and thrilling mix of romance and sci-fi, with a story of time warp and global warming

"Time passes more quickly than we think, as though everything moved at a crazy speed yet remained immobile.” In the audacious film Eternal [+see also:
interview: Ulaa Salim
film profile], unveiled in the Big Screen Competition of the 53rd IFFR, Danish filmmaker Ulaa Salim takes us into a very unusual universe of time paradoxes that is both playful (an underwater and futuristic European blockbuster) and existentialist (a love story and the alternative lives one might have experienced). The director was first revealed at the same festival in the Tiger Competition in 2019 with his debut feature, Sons of Denmark [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Elliott Crosset Hove
interview: Ulaa Salim
film profile]. This new work, which opens on the spectacular crumbling of a cliff (followed by brief images of a naked couple and a voice-over whispering “wake up”), employs the very effective style of an action film to explore metaphysical topics on the frontier between light and darkness, hope and the end of the world. 

“Since we are condemned, we might as well enjoy life:” for 21-year-old Anita (Nanna Øland Fabricius, better known as Oh Land), who dreams of becoming a singer, the goal of living is to be happy. Although he profoundly loves her after they fell in love with each other at first sight, 23-year-old Elias (Simon Sears) does not share her opinion at all. He studies to become a pilot and climatologist because of a very serious event that took place in Iceland a few years prior: “the Earth’s core began to evolve. The fault in the ocean floor is growing because of climate change. A submarine will have to close that fault in 20 years (...) or the magnetic field will change life on Earth.” A profound disagreement darkens their idyll, with the breakup also accelerated by a surprise pregnancy Elias rejects… 

15 years later, we find Elias at the commands of the Fortuna submersible, on a mission to close the fault. Propellers, signals, detection, drones, flux control: the operation is very dangerous, an alarm goes off and a strange luminous flash, an unspeakable anomaly, occurs. Between two press conferences while on a break in Denmark, Elias meets Anita by chance while she is singing in a bar. There are memories, the perfume of tenderness, but each now have their own separate lives: the past is well and truly dead. However a tragedy occurs during the second dive, a cathartic event that will completely throw into question Elias’ vision and his priorities… 

Structured in three chapters (“Forever young,” “The nucleus,” and “Eternal”), the story (written by the filmmaker) thankfully does not seek to offer rational explanations for surreal events, which adroitly blend mystical phenomena and ecological emergency. By borrowing the famous sequence bursting through the doors of perception (the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey), Ulaa Salim choses to give his story a very humane dimension, that of love and the mistakes we make for it, often without realising much later. What if it was possible to undo them, to play with the limits of Time itself? “I can be somebody new:” an eminently universal topic skilfully explored with gradual changes which the director conceals under an engrossing and very well controlled envelope of a sci-fi “blockbuster” accessible to all audiences. 

Produced by Hyæne Film and Netop Films, Eternal is sold internationally by New Europe Film Sales.

(Translated from French)