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By Laura Thornley

I’m going to plump a guess and predict you haven’t seen a documentary like this recently. Eerily spine-tingling yet strangely beautiful this doc feels visually more akin to an art piece than your usual documentary. No surprises then to hear that Michael Madsen also works in Conceptual Art. The premise is Onkalo, the Finnish nuclear waste storage unit currently being filled. It must stay sealed for 100,000 years in order to eventually decontaminate. Whilst there are all sorts of interesting and politically charged angles the film could focus on at this level, Madsen takes the road less travelled and has produced a doc that dares to deal with an almost mind blowing philosophical problem: what will be of our civilisation in 100,000 years?

How will we be able to communicate over that time the danger of the waste? How should we do this, with symbols, in what language? How can we envisage our civilisation so far in the future when our own world history is only a fraction of that time? These are but a few of the questions that the documentary poses. The philosophical, political and ethical issues are discussed through a series of interviews interlaced with incredible scenes of the foreboding Finnish winter landscape and inside the 4km tunnel, all backed by a throbbing Kraftwerk-esque soundtrack. But like the intangibility of the danger of nuclear waste itself, the film eludes answers.

The doc is so successful at creating a feeling of other worldy-ness it’s actually quite creepy; this isn’t just that we are talking about the future but we could actually be there. Beautifully crafted shots, with deep perspectives and clinical surroundings are inescapably Sci-Fi, more likely inspired by Alien than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. And that is part of the wonder of this film – it’s a documentary that appears to draw on fiction since our current understanding of facts is so fleeting; it draws on allegory, language and symbolism. It is quite disturbing to learn that the task of communicating the danger of this area to the future has barely been discussed and that Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a real contender for the keep out sign.

For some the doc may be a little too evasive. It doesn’t stand and judge the use of nuclear power as such – and that could frustrate (depending on how passionate you feel about the cause).  And the scenes in the tunnel of the filmmaker, speaking allegorically of a fire that won’t go out, may verge on a little cheesy. But the visual beauty of the film and the intelligent approach do more than make up for any of these qualms.  This is ultimately a thoroughly thought provoking film, goose pimple inducing in all the right ways and will remain with you long after the curtain falls.

Michael Madsen, Denmark 2009, 75mins

Into Eternity was released in 12th November. Click here for information on places to see the film.

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Want to know more? Read DFG's Q&A with the director, Michael Madsen

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