"Troll" (2022)

Troll presents itself as a straightforward kaiju film. Something giant and ancient awakens, the government responds, and the race begins to contain a threat that cannot be easily controlled. The structure is familiar, but what gives the film its weight is not the creature itself, but what its presence reveals about the world that encounters it.

The modern response is immediate and predictable. The troll is treated as a problem to be solved through force. Military power is deployed, strategies are formed, and the assumption remains that with enough precision and strength, the threat can be eliminated. What is missing is not intelligence or capability but understanding. The creature is approached as an anomaly rather than as something with history, meaning, and place.

That absence of understanding is where the film quietly does its work. The troll does not feel like an invader so much as a remnant. It belongs to a story that has been set aside, absorbed into folklore, and ultimately dismissed. Modern Norway, confident in its scientific and technological framework, has no real category for something like this. The past has been reduced to narrative, and narrative is not expected to return in physical form. Modernity has lost the connection to the metanarrative, the story that explains and reveals reality.

There is a brief suggestion that the story is more complicated than simple folklore. The tension between the ancient world and the later Christian identity of Norway surfaces for a moment, hinting that what is now considered foundational was once itself an intrusion into something older. The film does not explore this in any sustained way, and it quickly recedes into the background. What remains is not a developed critique of Christianity, but a broader reflection on how layers of history are built, often without fully reckoning with what they replace.

The stronger emphasis falls elsewhere. The troll is bound to the land, to a world that has been reshaped and, in some sense, forgotten. Its destruction does not come across as purely arbitrary. It carries the sense of displacement, as though something long buried has been forced into the open. The modern world’s instinct is to respond with greater force, but that response only reinforces the misunderstanding at the heart of the conflict. This is where the film resonates most clearly. It reflects a view of the world in which creation itself bears the consequences of human action. The problem is not simply that something dangerous has appeared, but that the relationship between humanity and the world it inhabits has been reduced to control and management. The troll becomes a visible expression of that tension, not a moral agent in any clear sense, but not entirely without context either.

In the end, the film does not offer a particularly complex resolution, but it does leave behind a recognizable idea. The world is not empty or neutral. It carries memory, even when that memory is ignored. Efforts to dominate without understanding tend to deepen conflict rather than resolve it. What has been buried does not simply disappear, and what has been forgotten does not remain silent indefinitely. Troll may not develop every thread it introduces, but it remains effective in this respect. The monster draws attention, but the real focus is on the limits of a worldview that assumes power is enough. The deeper problem is not the presence of the creature, but the inability to recognize what it represents.