VIDE ARCTIQUE

Three American film-makers join an Arctic cruise from Svalbard where they hope to film the amazing wildlife that thrives in this otherwise hostile environment. They awake one morning, though, to find the boat has done a bit of a "Marie Celeste". The engines have stopped working, the boat is adrift amongst some precarious ice floes and cliffs, and there is no sign of the crew!! No response to their mayday messages so they conclude that taking to their riff and finding a settlement on land is their best option. Luckily, they stumble upon a facility that initially offers them hope of survival and rescue, but quickly they realise that things are not quite what they seem and they might just have been better off staying on the big boat! The photography and the scenario do work quite well to help create a slight sense of peril but that is about the height of this rather procedural horror/sci-fi hybrid. It's let down by some seriously mediocre acting, too much score and writing that delivers far too much by way of unnecessary chatter amongst the three men who gradually start to get paranoid about just about everything. As we eventually discover, the underlying premiss is actually quite decent - it's just that it all comes far too late in the proceedings to rescue it from the cinematic iceberg that we all see looming right from the start. I think the title is missing a vowel from the second word.