CADAVER. More Uconventional Approach to Horror

Although Scandinavian cinema is typically associated with deep psychological profiling, social commentary and stark realism, horror films have a surprisingly long — and often impressive — tradition in the North. After all, it was filmmakers from this region who gave us titles like Day of Wrath, Lake of the Dead or Let the Right One In, films that in their time helped carve out new paths for cinematic horror. Recently, however, genuinely interesting Scandinavian works emerging from the horror core have become rare (Joachim Trier’s Thelma is certainly one of the exceptions), while B-movie fare like Villmark or Thale remains plentiful.Against this background, Cadaver, available on Netflix, initially promised something genuinely intriguing — hinting at a more unconventional approach to horror, closer to surrealism and social allegory.

Any such hopes evaporate almost immediately. The prelude to Jarand Breian Herdal’s film introduces its world through clunky sequences that dump exposition about the characters’ situation, only to transition into the main narrative with an embarrassingly overused device. There we meet our three protagonists — Leonora and Jacob, and their daughter Alice. They live in a dystopian, post-nuclear city somewhere in Norway, suffering from deadly famine amid ruins and corpses, just like everyone else.

It all sounds ominous, but in Cadaver it really isn’t — the post-apocalyptic landscapes are strikingly lazy and almost completely devoid of impact. They feel like a mere backdrop, a pretext to launch the central intrigue — and that impression is probably accurate. But here lies an even bigger issue: the introduction of the main plot is painfully clumsy and simply unbelievable. And I say this as someone who avoids nitpicking “illogicality” in films like the plague.

The setup goes like this: in the midst of hunger, cold and extreme poverty, an invitation appears for an exclusive theatrical performance in an old mansion. The tickets are, of course, expensive — yet crowds rush to buy them, including Leonora, a former actress longing for her old life. So the family joins others at this mysterious show. Does it already sound like the story is stretching plausibility for the sake of its ideas? Let me add that the film skips past the ticket-buying scene with a time jump that suggests the family paid nearly everything they had — and the justification for all this is the need to “escape reality” and briefly feel the breeze of normal life.

So does that mean the supposedly grim reality shown at the start… wasn’t all that grim? Or did the writer-director simply fail to outline the social dynamics of this world convincingly? Hint: he barely outlined them at all. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not claiming that culture or entertainment have no place in times of crisis (especially today). I’m saying that Cadaver places its mysterious theatre extremely awkwardly within the context it builds around it.

This brings me to my main doubt regarding the screenplay: was it really necessary to set the story in a devastated, post-nuclear world? Cadaver contains several potentially interesting threads that could have worked as social metaphors — class tensions, exploitation of the poor, and even an almost de-Brodovskian motif of life as theatre.

But all of this would have played far better in a contemporary setting, anchored in recognizable social realities (as in Parasite, for example). By pushing the story into a post-apocalyptic future, the film suspends these themes in a vacuum, stripping them of critical bite and turning them into generic tropes that mean precisely nothing in a broader context.

Even then, Cadaver’s ideas aren’t executed well enough to rise above genre mediocrity. The performance Leonora and her family attend quickly turns into a follow-the-actors tour around the mansion, devolving into a classic cat-and-mouse chase once the organizers’ immoral intentions come to light — led by the demonic (but in a thoroughly cliché way) director Mathias. The chaotic running through the mansion leads to predictable twists already given away by the film’s premise and trailer, and to interpersonal conflicts with no real spark.

At the center is Leonora, played by Gitte Witt — she fits the mold of the cornered mother discovering her strength, but offers little beyond that. The rest of the cast delivers merely adequate performances, and none of the characters manage to establish a meaningful connection with the audience. Their emotional struggles feel too staged, too artificial.

The final nail in Cadaver’s coffin is its visual style. Herdal shapes his spectacle from borrowed (read: copied) visual tropes from Eyes Wide Shut and Delicatessen, but lacks both Kubrick’s formal vision and Jeunet’s frenetic visual flair. In fact, the associations with Delicatessen highlight just how much the Norwegian film falls short — Jeunet and Caro created a brilliant grotesque blending an inventive plot with social hyperbole, while Cadaver ends up yet another formulaic horror exercise.

What’s worse, the film lacks a compelling aesthetic identity. The sterile, uninspired lighting and framing of the old mansion, courtesy of Jallo Faber, strip the locations of any atmosphere — nothing here can evoke unease, let alone genuine horror.

Ultimately, Cadaver lands among the many bland local productions regularly uploaded to Netflix’s library — watchable if you need to kill time on a lazy evening, but hardly worth seeking out. Herdal’s film does contain a handful of better moments, even a few that manage to catch the eye, and the determined viewer might extract some reflection on humanity and survival. But it’s nowhere near enough. And while the film doesn’t aim particularly high, that’s precisely why it should have delivered stylistic precision and genre playfulness. Compared with the worst and most bizarre Norwegian horror films, Cadaver is still far from Villmark 2 — but that’s not much of a consolation.