In a remote, mountainous Northern Norway of the mid-19th century, an agricultural man seeking a new life – Isak – meets a woman with a cleft lip – Inger – completely by chance. At the beginning of Hans Petter Moland’s Growth of the Soil, we know nothing about either, but little by little, we will see their co-survival mechanisms bloom into deep feelings of love, setting the groundwork for the saga to come: that of a socioeconomic and technological metamorphosis leading to what we refer to as modernity.

After its world premiere in Toronto, in the Special Presentations programme, Growth of the Soil, a title written by the director and Gard B. Eidsvold (who also plays the former sheriff Geissler in the film) which has just been selected by Norway as its Oscar submission, is now vying for the Golden Shell in San Sebastián. Moland’s new feature, based on the Nobel Prize-winning 1917 stream-of-consciousness novel of the same name by Knut Hamsun (a brilliant but controversial novelist who openly admired Hitler and gifted his Nobel Prize to Goebbels), is a quiet, sparse and hermetic two-and-a-half hour epic that (successfully) simplifies the original book. Although films of this sort often run the risk of losing the poetic punctum that makes their literary source so thought-provoking, here, Moland manages to retain some of that compelling, contemplative repose.

Isak is played in all of his reticent glory – his emotions only coming out through little nods and twitches of the head – by a bearded Herbert Nordrum (better known as the clean-shaven face of the protagonist’s spontaneous love interest in The Worst Person in the World). The more openly expressive Inger, who shall undergo the biggest personal transformation, is embodied by Swedish-born thesp Asta Kamma August. The first half almost exclusively features the couple (with equal weight given to both perspectives), whom both leads thankfully play with believable grace – as a less formidable or imbalanced pairing would have made for a much more drudging work.

The epic begins where generations do – with the birth of a child – and expands through several decades. We see the couple build a homestead, work through hard crop seasons and raise multiple kids, until a long stint in prison separates the family, which is when the implications of time passing and the changes it brings really begin to take their toll. Eventually, the expansive wealth of land that was their own to maintain is gradually overrun by settlers, and the arrival of an eager new pioneer (Oddgeir Thune) further upsets the couple’s dynamics. The last third of the film is less rich in developments than its earlier parts, but the story never stops evolving, without its characters ever becoming archetypes.

It is the shock of technological modernity, and the radical transformation of all kinds of societal constructions that ensues, which come to represent a threat to this family’s peace, especially to Isak’s sense of reality, as he has built it around him and from the ground up. It becomes immensely fascinating to witness his slow disillusionment, for what he sees as threats (from a mechanical clock to a sewing machine, anything representing this rapidly industrialising world, really), others, including Inger, see as progress.

Gisle Tveito’s sound design takes precedence over Kaspar Kaae’s score, but the latter comes out boldly in memorably reverberant (and gently anachronistic or anatopic, even, to match Isak’s maladaptive behaviour) plucked guitar and dramatic strings that float on top of the film’s most pensive moments. With dialogue at an absolute bare minimum, Moland expertly brings the primitivist core of Hamsun’s book to a cinematic audience without ever resorting to ham-fisted narrative techniques or visual over-romanticism (a special thanks to the film’s tight 4:3 aspect ratio).

Growth of the Soil was produced by 4 1/2 Film AS (Norway), Scanbox Entertainment Productions (Denmark) and Nadcon (Germany). World sales are handled by Beta Cinema.