No Rest for the Wicked US première at Fantastic Fest, 20th Sept 2026
The stormy waters that are a mere metaphor in the Biblical passage1 from which No Rest for the Wicked dynamically takes its title come literalised within the film. For it begins with a brooding ocean that, in the early dawn light, buffets the rocky cliffs of the islands that spring from it. These are the Faroes, a remote archipelago between Iceland and Norway, where human subsistence is reliant on fishing as much as sheep grazing. It is a place so barren and treeless that in 1862, when the film is set, the only timber available to locals for boat building is whatever driftwood chances to wash ashore from elsewhere. Everything in this harsh, literally isolated existence comes from the changeable, often treacherous sea, and can at any moment be taken back by it.
That includes Helge (Pilou Asbæk), who first appears on screen underwater where he is rescuing unconscious young local Baldur (Egor Venned) from sinking and drowning in the depths. Both men, in their separate boats, have got caught in a thick fog and a strong current, and although Helge has just saved his life, Baldur is initially wary of this Danish-speaking outsider. For good-natured Helge is everything that Baldur is not: where Baldur is duty-bound to look after his widowed mother Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen), Helge is a completely free spirit without dependents; and where Baldur’s horizons are confined to his life on the Faroes, Helge gets work on one merchant whaling boat after another so that he can see the world. Where Baldur’s life is tightly defined by family, church and, of course, the sea, Helge is open to whatever new thing lies around the corner and over the edge.
Helge’s freedom from attachments makes him a desirable catch for Ásla, who is only too happy for the charming whaler to keep coming over to the house – but Helge’s eye is drawn more to Baldur, and Baldur definitely feels the same way, and is starting for the first time to imagine leaving his island’s narrow boundaries for the bigger, more transgressive world beyond. All this makes Kasper Kelle’s feature, written by Rasmus Birch, conform to a classic coming-out narrative, as a young momma’s boy must decide between continuing to live in denial of who he is and what he wants, or taking his chances on an uncharted ocean of new experience.
Yet besides sea and sexuality, there is another boundary that will need to be transgressed for Baldur and Helge to come together: death itself. For at a certain point, No Rest for the Wicked drifts into genre, as a man lost at sea is summoned back by an improvised blood ritual, and returns as a watery vampire who sucks nipples rather than necks, who can seep into other people’s bodies, and who will do anything to be eternally reunited with his lover. This divides the villagers between those who would see such forbidden feelings forever buried, and those willing to accept, honour and accommodate a love that lies outside of their understanding.
No Rest for the Wicked is a dark, queer romantic fable, finding strange, surreal elements beneath its naturalistic period details, and offering a portrait, equally touching and grotesque, of desire in a repressive community. While the title casts the film’s narrative in moral terms, in the end it is not clear to whom the word ‘wicked’ might be referring. For here, love proves as boundless, dangerous and overwhelming as the ocean, and anyone unwilling freely to navigate its tides risks drowning in it.
strap: Coming out (of the water): in Kasper Kalle’s queer dark romance, love overcomes death itself on a nineteenth-century Faroe Island.
© Anton Bitel
- “But the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud. ‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked.’” (Isaiah 57.20-21) ↩︎
