'Arctic' Trailer: Mads Mikkelsen Learns There's Snowplace Like Home

Mads Mikkelsen freezes his butt off in the Arctic trailer. The Hannibal actor plays a man stranded in the Arctic after surviving a plane crash. Now he has to make a choice: stay at his relatively safe (but very chilly) camp, or brave the elements in a search for help. Ice, snow and polar bears abound. Watch the Arctic trailer below, and remember to bundle up.

Mads Mikkelsen? More like mad icicles, son! (I'm so sorry.) The actor plays Overgård, "a resourceful yet increasingly desperate man stranded in a remote, snow-covered wilderness." Here's the official Arctic synopsis:

The sole survivor of a plane crash in an icy wasteland lives by his wits as he waits for help to arrive. But when a long-awaited rescue effort fails, he faces a life-or-death decision: remain in the relative safety of his camp and hope to be found, or embark on an arduous trek that may be the only hope for both him and a critically injured stranger.

If Mikkelsen's character is the sole survivor, where does the "critically injured stranger" we see in the trailer come from? I guess we'll have to wait and see. Arctic is helmed by writer/director Joe Penna, making his feature debut. "I wanted to create a film that can't just play in the background," Penna says of Arctic. "You have to be completely engaged. You have to be actively creating your own version of the film in your head."

Penna wanted realism here, and according to the official Arctic press kit, the film was "shot in the intimidating highlands of Iceland, a sparsely populated volcanic plateau where roads become impassable during the winter. Iceland's experienced film crews and expansive frozen vistas provided the resources the filmmakers required, but the shoot was taxing, both physically and mentally." In short, it was very, very cold. Here are some more fun details from the shoot that will make you want to heat up a bowl of soup:

Winds blew up to 40 miles an hour. Car doors broke off their hinges in the wind and tumbled hundreds of feet. The weather would change at a moment's notice, shifting from sleet and rain to clear and sunny.Then a sudden snow squall might stop production for the day. There were frequent road closures, and equipment trucks ended up stuck in the snow far from the set. Conditions changed almost hourly, destroying continuity.

I'm a fan of Mikkelsen (who isn't?), and I'm a fan of man vs. nature movies – The Grey, The Edge, certain parts of The Revenant – so Arctic looks promising. I also like how this trailer is cut – it doesn't spell everything out, and relies instead on its visuals to tell its story. More trailers should follow this method instead of following a standard, boring format.

Arctic arrives in select theaters on February 1, 2019.