The Tunnel is proof that you don’t need a silly Roland Emmerich-style Hollywood budget to deliver an absorbing and enthralling disaster movie. In fact, The Tunnel suggests that you can actually look a bit further afield than Hollywood to deliver those particular cinematic chills and spills as the film takes us to the cold, snowy hillscapes of a pre-Christmas Norway and a tale of fire, smoke, choking and dysfunctional family angst.
A few hours before the festive period and everyone in Norway is in a hurry to get back home to the warmth of the family bosom. Our attentions are drawn to tough, grizzled firefighter Stein (Thorbjørn Harr), a widower whose daughter Elisa (Ylva Fuglerud) refuses to accept her father’s new relationship with Ingrid (Lisa Carlehad) and clearly isn’t keen on spending Christmas with her father and his new squeeze when she is still processing her birth mother’s death. Elisa flounces off in a huff and boards a coach in an attempt to distance herself from her father’s new circumstances. A blizzard is raging and, as bad luck would have it, a petrol tanker crashes in a crowded tunnel and quickly bursts into flames. A wall of choking smoke rolls along the tunnel overwhelming the backed-up traffic that, inevitably, includes the coach bearing the gloomy Elisa. Worsening weather conditions impede the attempts of the rescue services to reach the scene and the survivors of the conflagration are forced to fight their way through the chaos and the choking acrid smoke with the help of anxious emergency services call worker Andrea (Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes), who quickly realises that the situation is desperate and getting worse with every second.
By its very nature as a disaster movie, The Tunnel is unable – and very probably unwilling – to avoid the over-familiar cliches of the genre. Many characters are little more than thumbnails, quickly disposed of as we focus on Elisa as she steps up to the plate to try and find a way out of the tunnel, a couple of young kids separated from their parents and trapped in the chaos and, of course, Elisa’s dad as he discovers that his daughter is trapped in the tunnel. With conditions deteriorating fast and preventing the rescue services from mounting a full-scale rescue mission, Stein takes his life into his own hands and plunges into the carnage to find his daughter and anyone else who may be fighting for survival in the hellish inferno.
Watching The Tunnel is a bit like meeting up with an old friend in an unfamiliar environment. The story is predictable, the character beats are ones we know by heart, and there’s very little new here for lovers of the disaster movie genre. But the bitingly cold and challenging Norwegian setting refreshes the formula and the focus isn’t entirely on the spectacle; once the tanker explodes we’re left staggering blindly through the smoke in a claustrophobic tunnel and it’s a genuinely stifling and uncomfortable visual experience pretty much guaranteed to leave the viewer feeling hot under the collar. The Tunnel ticks all the disaster movie boxes without even attempting to reinvent the genre and there’s absolute nothing wrong with that and no reason at all why it should even try.
The Tunnel is available now on digital platforms.
