Qivitoq is a 1956 film from Denmark, directed by Erik Balling.
The entire film is set on Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark. Eva, a pretty young Danish woman, takes a boat to the island to surprise her fiancé, a doctor who's working there. She's met at the hospital by a nurse, who delivers some surprising news: the nurse and the doctor are lovers, and Eva's relationship is over.
A shocked Eva becomes determined to leave the island ASAP, rather than be stuck in a small village with her ex-fiancé and his girlfriend. The only problem is that the next boat won't leave for a week. Eva is sent north to an even smaller village, a fishing community. She winds up taking the spare bed in the home of Jens, the Dane who manages the fishing business. Jens is very unhappy about having to host a woman in his cozy bachelor cabin.
Naturally, they fall in love.
Tropes:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: It's eventually revealed that Erik, Eva's boyfriend, started sleeping with the nurse not because he didn't want to be with Eva anymore, but because he was lonely and horny in Greenland. He goes on a rant to Eva about how Greenland is dirty and dark and cold and he hates it, before asking her to take him back. She turns him down.
- Appeal to Tradition: No one thinks very much of Pavia's ambition to get a fishing boat and become a fisherman, when the Inuit have traditionally survived by harpooning seals. Everyone cackles derisively when Pavia comes back from his first fishing trip with nothing.
- Beta Couple: Pavia and Naja, a young Inuit couple in the village. He gives her a pretty dress, but later she gets jealous and turns a cold shoulder after coming to believe that Pavia is sweet on Eva.
- Call-Back: Zacharias, the seemingly shiftless local who bums tobacco and food off of Jens, and keeps claiming that his injured arm makes it impossible to work. At the end Zacharias proudly tells Jens that his arm is all better and he's eager to go fishing with Pavia.
- Comforting Comforter: Does Jens have a softer side, despite all his grumbling and generally hostile manner? Of course he does, as shown when he pulls a blanket over a sobbing Eva, after she ran back down below in hysterics after the little boat narrowly missed an iceberg.
- Crash-Into Hello: The foreshadowing is heavy when Eva slips on the way down the rope ladder to the dinghy, and falls right into Jens's arms.
- Downer Beginning: Eva lands in Greenland all cheerful and excited, only to find out that she's been dumped.
- Dramatic Thunder: Actually it isn't thunder. It's the sound of ice continually cleaving from the glacier and falling into the ocean to make icebergs. But it sounds just the same, and it's heard repeatedly as Jens goes chasing across the glacier after Pavia, who is wandering off into the ice to die.
- Foreshadowing: Eva is warned to stay away from the dogs in the villages, and is told that in the summer they are underfed and "not very nice". Later, a pack of hungry dogs attacks and badly injures a child.
- Happy Dance: Mama Caecile and a couple other old ladies do a literal happy dance, after Pavia comes back with a freshly killed seal.
- He-Man Woman Hater: Jens does a lot of angry grumbling about "women!" when he finds out that he's going to be compelled to host a Danish lady for a while.
- Mighty Whitey: There's an element of this with Jens, the only white man in the village and the manager of the cannery. He's the one who's pushing the natives to adopt deep-sea fishing as another way of supporting themselves.
- Moment Killer: Jens and Eva's dance has turned into an embrace and they seem about to kiss, when Pavia barges in and says he didn't catch anything from his fishing trip. The interruption and the fact that Eva was the cause of the failure—Jens was busy with her and couldn't go with Pavia—thoroughly kills the moment, as Eva says she's a complication and should just go home.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The qivitoq, a zombie-ish
creature who creeps down to the mountains to feed on the living, according to local legend. The myth holds that the qivitoq are the undead forms of people who left their village and wandered into the ice to die, after being socially shamed. - Title Drop: Mama Caecile says she doesn't want a Danish-style house because all those big doors and windows let in the qivitoq. This is followed by an explanation from Jens to Eva on what the qivitoq is, namely undead spirits that live in the ice. Later Eva realizes that she's like a qivitoq, having run away from her problems like the legend of people who ran off into the ice and became qivitoq.
