KRAKEN Review

Kraken opens on old news footage. Eyewitness interviews. People describing something massive in the water near a Norwegian fjord. The helicopters searched. They found nothing.

Cut to present day. Two kids on a jet ski fall into the water and don't come back up.

Johanne (Sara Khorami) is a marine researcher who gets called in to inspect a fish farm in Vangsnes. Her first instinct is to pass. She has her reasons.

Then she sees video of fish voluntarily jumping out of the water onto land. Whatever is down there has them spooked enough to leave the water entirely.

She's in.

What follows is a slow, deliberate build. Nets washed ashore with no explanation. Something massive spotted beneath the surface of the fjord. And then a sea lice transponder gets raised from the water with a deep-water parasite wedged inside it. One that has no business being that size.

If the parasite is that big, how big is its host?

The characters don't get a lot of depth. You root for the scientists because they're the scientists, not because the film gives you a reason to care what happens to them. In most genres, that's a fatal problem.

Lucky for us, this is a creature feature.

Shot across Norway and Finland, the fjord does a lot of the heavy lifting here. It's hard to make either country not look like a pristine postcard. The landscape earns the same unease the creature does, which is a big reason why the nearly hour-long wait for the Kraken doesn't feel like a wait at all. Director Pål Øie and his crew didn't come to reinvent the wheel. They committed to the genre, leaned on the landscape, and trusted the tension they'd built.

When the Kraken finally arrives, buckle up.

Kraken isn't going to be for everyone. If slow burns and atmospheric builds aren't your thing, you'll check out long before it pays off. But for anyone willing to give it the patience it asks for, it delivers exactly what it promises.

Creature feature fans, this one's all yours.

🍿 SCORE = 72/100