Spoilers for Troll (2022) and Troll 2 (2025).
There is a peculiar pleasure in returning to a film you remember liking but no longer remember very well. The broad shapes remain — a mountain, a very large creature, Ine Marie Wilmann looking alarmed but determined — while the connective tissue has quietly vanished. That was roughly where I was with Troll. I remembered enjoying it enormously in 2022, and I remembered being surprised that a Norwegian monster film on Netflix could feel this substantial without turning itself into an imitation of an American blockbuster.
So when Troll 2 arrived, I went back and watched the first film again before moving directly into the sequel. That turned out to be the right way to do it, because the two films are less interesting as a simple bigger-is-better progression than as a conversation about what happens when folklore survives modernity, when a country turns its old stories into inconvenient evidence, and when a monster film decides that the monster may have a legitimate grievance.
A Monster I Had Half Remembered
Troll begins with one of those wonderfully old-fashioned genre ideas that can be explained in a sentence: blasting work in the Dovre Mountains wakes something that should have remained inside the mountain. Director Roar Uthaug and screenwriter Espen Aukan then build a modern disaster movie around that premise, bringing palaeontologist Nora Tidemann into a government response that initially has no vocabulary for what it is seeing.
What I had forgotten was how quickly the film establishes its emotional centre. Nora is not simply the scientist drafted into the impossible case. She is also the daughter of Tobias Tidemann, a disgraced folklore researcher whose belief in trolls wrecked his professional life and damaged his relationship with her. The monster therefore arrives carrying two kinds of evidence: proof that the old stories are true, and proof that Nora’s father was not mad in quite the way everyone had decided he was.
The Film That Became Much Bigger Than Norway
The scale of the audience is now part of the story. Netflix currently lists Troll at 103 million views, keeping it as the service’s most popular non-English-language film. That is a strange fate for something so specifically Norwegian. The film does not disguise its language, flatten its geography or import an American character to explain Norway to the rest of us; it trusts that a troll, a mountain and a frightened group of people are enough.
That may be the more important way the franchise has altered the streaming-era monster movie. Troll does not reinvent the grammar of giant-creature cinema. You can see Godzilla, Jurassic Park and any number of disaster films somewhere in its bones. What it demonstrates instead is that global scale no longer requires a story to surrender its local accent first.
Nora, Tobias and the Cost of Being Right Too Early
Wilmann is the person who keeps the first film from floating away on digital spectacle. Nora can be abrasive and impatient, but she is never presented as a superhuman problem-solving machine. She has inherited her father’s stubbornness while spending much of her adult life trying not to inherit his beliefs, and that tension gives the film somewhere to go once the troll itself has been revealed.
Gard B. Eidsvold’s Tobias is equally important. His vindication is not clean or triumphant because the years of ridicule have already done their work. He has become the sort of man who lives among notebooks, legends and accumulated proof that nobody wants, which means his reunion with Nora carries the awkwardness of two people who still love each other but have not agreed on what happened to them.
Kim Falck’s Andreas works from a different register. He is a government adviser who seems perpetually surprised that his day has turned into a monster film, but Falck keeps the comedy light enough that Andreas never becomes a cartoon. Mads Sjøgård Pettersen’s Captain Kristoffer Holm completes the group by giving the military side of the story a face more complicated than the usual collection of uniforms waiting to fire missiles.
The Folklore Is Not Decoration
The most useful thing Troll does with folklore is treat it as a form of knowledge rather than decorative flavour. The film borrows familiar ideas from Norwegian troll traditions — creatures bound to mountains, fear of church bells, vulnerability to sunlight — then rearranges them to fit its own mythology. It is not a documentary about Norwegian belief, and it occasionally blurs Norse myth and later folk tradition, but the stories matter because the characters eventually have to stop treating them as childish residue.
That is also why the creature works better when the film slows down long enough to look at it. The troll is enormous, frightening and destructive, but it is not evil in any interesting sense. It has been awakened, attacked and displaced, and much of its violence becomes understandable once Nora realises that it is moving towards something rather than simply rampaging at random.
A Creature With Weight
The visual effects remain one of the film’s quiet achievements. The troll looks as though gravity applies to it. Moss, stone, soil and vegetation seem to belong to the same body, and when it walks there is a sense that the surrounding landscape is being asked to absorb the movement of something that should really still be a mountain.
Uthaug understands scale in a clean, readable way. Helicopters, roads, houses and eventually Oslo become measuring devices, giving the creature something recognisable to stand beside. That sounds obvious, but plenty of effects-heavy films lose their monsters inside visual noise. Troll usually knows where the creature is, where the people are and why we should care about the distance between them.
Oslo, Sunlight and a Very Large Skull
The final stretch is where the film becomes most openly playful. The troll reaches the modern city, the government edges towards catastrophic solutions, and Nora’s group works with the logic of the old stories instead. The plan involving artificial ultraviolet light is just ridiculous enough to feel right for the film, especially because Nora ultimately cannot bring herself to treat the creature as nothing more than a target.
What lands for me on rewatch is the sadness underneath the spectacle. The troll is not defeated because Nora finally proves she is cleverer than the monster. It dies with sunrise, after she has already decided to stop torturing it with light. The image turns what could have been a simple victory into something closer to the extinction of a survivor who arrived in the wrong century.
Three Years Later, the Sequel Has a Problem to Solve
A sequel to a hit like this has an obvious commercial instruction: more. More creature, more damage, more mythology and ideally more than one troll. Troll 2, released on 1 December 2025, does all of that, but it is smarter when it begins by asking what the first film did to Nora.
She has retreated into the mountains and drifted towards the life her father once led. Uthaug has said that he deliberately wanted Nora to be becoming Tobias when we meet her again, and that is a much better starting point than simply putting the old team back in a helicopter. She has seen the impossible, helped kill the last creature she encountered and then spent years trying to understand what else might still be out there.
Vemork and the Megatroll
Andreas pulls her back into the world at Vemork, where a research team has been studying an enormous dormant troll. The location gives the sequel a useful layer of real Norwegian history before the film cheerfully piles fantasy on top of it. Nora’s arrival also introduces Marion Rhadani, played by Sara Khorami, whose instinct is to study and control what Nora increasingly wants to understand and coexist with.
The awakening works because it is intimate before it becomes destructive. Nora hums, the creature responds, and a moment of almost childlike communication becomes the trigger for catastrophe. The sequel keeps returning to this idea that the trolls are not simply bodies to be fought. They react to sound, memory, pain and recognition, which makes the eventual battle scenes feel like the disastrous end of a failed conversation rather than a sporting event.
Beautiful Changes the Equation
The sequel’s best addition is Beautiful, the surviving son of the mountain king from the first film. Nora has found him and developed a relationship through sounds and gestures, which pushes the series away from the question of whether trolls exist and towards the more difficult question of whether humans can live beside them.
There is an obvious Iron Giant quality to these scenes, but they earn their sentiment because Nora’s tenderness has been prepared by the ending of the first film. She could not save the creature in Oslo. With Beautiful, she is trying to prove that knowledge does not always have to end in containment, weaponisation or a body on the ground.
Saint Olav, Nidaros and the Film’s Invented History
The Trondheim section is where Troll 2 becomes most ambitious and where it needs the clearest distinction between history and invention. The film folds Saint Olav, the Christianisation of Norway, Nidaros Cathedral and its pilgrimage tradition into a secret history in which trolls were persecuted and Olav eventually tried to protect them. Inside the story, that revision gives Megatroll a destination and a grievance instead of leaving him as a larger version of the first creature.
It is also very much the film’s alternate history. The real Olav Haraldsson was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, and the cathedral that became Nidaros was later built over his burial site as his cult and pilgrimage tradition grew. The hidden decree, the troll sanctuary and the Church conspiracy belong to Uthaug and Aukan’s fantasy. Knowing that actually makes the device more interesting, because the sequel is consciously treating national history the same way folklore works: as material that is retold until it explains what the present needs to understand.
Bigger, but Not Automatically Better
The sequel is undeniably more ambitious. Uthaug has said that the first film’s budget limited how many trolls could appear, so the second takes the opportunity to stage the thing the franchise had been saving: one giant troll fighting another. The effects team also concentrated on facial expression, motion capture and the physical reverberation of the creatures’ movement, which helps the bigger set-pieces retain the sense of mass that made the first film convincing.
Yet I still prefer the original as a film. Troll is cleaner and more direct because every new piece of information moves Nora closer to understanding the creature and her father. Troll 2 has more mythology, more characters and more locations, which means it occasionally feels as though it is carrying a larger backpack than the story strictly needs.
Andreas Stops Being the Sidekick
Andreas’s death is the sequel’s biggest emotional gamble. Falck has said the idea was his: if the comic-relief sidekick dies, the audience will not be waiting for it. The mechanics are gloriously monster-movie specific — holy water has to reach Megatroll internally, the last explosive cannot be triggered remotely, and Andreas makes the decision to go with it.
What makes the scene work is that the film does not suddenly reveal a different Andreas. He is still the same slightly awkward, earnest man who has spent two films standing beside people more obviously qualified for danger. His final act comes from the same quality that made him useful all along: he believes the group matters more than he does. The Star Trek reference is almost absurdly on-brand, which is exactly why it hurts.
The Monster Mash, Finally
Beautiful’s return turns the climax into the franchise image that was probably inevitable from the moment a sequel was approved: two enormous trolls tearing into each other while human plans collapse around them. It is louder than the first film, but the sequence still has a story function because Nora is emotionally invested in one of the creatures rather than watching two effects shots compete for screen space.
The sound work is just as important as the visuals. The trolls do not merely roar; they grind, groan and resonate, as if their voices are travelling through rock before reaching the air. Against that geological noise, Nora’s humming remains deliberately small. The franchise’s central fantasy is not really that trolls exist. It is that listening might still matter after everyone has already reached for a weapon.
Where the Franchise Still Stumbles
Neither film is especially interested in surprising us with its basic disaster-movie machinery. Governments make the wrong calls, military solutions escalate the problem, experts are ignored until the evidence becomes too large to ignore, and somebody usually has only a few minutes left before a catastrophe becomes irreversible. The first film gets away with this because the pace is so clean; the sequel sometimes exposes the framework by hanging more mythology from it.
The tone can wobble as well. Andreas’s humour is part of the films’ charm, but the sequel asks us to pivot from broad adventure to genuine grief very quickly. Some supporting characters remain functions rather than people, and the historical material occasionally arrives in dense blocks because the film has a great deal of mythology to move into position before the final act.
Still, those weaknesses are easier for me to live with than the generic flattening that affects a lot of large streaming productions. These films know where they are. The mountains, roads, hydroelectric infrastructure, Trondheim streets and old religious architecture are not interchangeable scenery. Norway is not simply where the monster happens to attack; it is the reason this particular monster story exists.
What the Troll Films Changed for Streaming Monster Movies
The word “redefined” in the title probably needs a qualification. Troll did not invent a new kind of giant-monster narrative, and Uthaug has never pretended that he did. What the first film changed was the expectation around scale: a Norwegian-language creature feature rooted in local folklore could travel globally without being remade, dubbed into cultural neutrality or surrounded by recognisable Hollywood faces.
That matters in the streaming era because distribution is now capable of making something local enormous almost overnight. The danger is that platforms then learn the wrong lesson and manufacture international films that have been sanded down in advance for everyone. Troll succeeded partly because it did the opposite. Its folklore, language and geography were not obstacles to a worldwide audience; they were the hook.
Troll 2 takes that success and behaves like a sequel should: it tests how much more the world can hold. Sometimes the answer is slightly too much, but I would rather watch it overreach through Norwegian history, hidden tunnels and troll communication than watch a safer second film simply repeat the drive to Oslo.
Is There a Troll 3? Not Yet
The post-credit scene certainly wants us thinking about another film. Professor Møller has preserved a piece of troll material that has developed into a furious miniature specimen in a glass container, which is exactly the sort of image franchises use when they would like to keep the door open. As of now, however, Troll 3 has not been confirmed.
Uthaug has said he sees more potential in the universe if the saga continues, which is a more interesting position than pretending the next chapter already exists. If there is a third film, I hope it follows the implication of Nora’s ending rather than simply finding an even larger troll. The series has already done awakening and escalation. Coexistence, ownership and what happens when the old world is no longer willing to stay hidden could take it somewhere stranger.
Three and a Half Hours of Trolls Later
Watching the two films back-to-back takes roughly three and a half hours, which is enough time to become surprisingly invested in the political rights of enormous geological beings. I came out of the marathon still preferring the tighter first film, but liking the sequel more for the ways it complicates Nora’s position and gives the creatures something beyond size.
My ratings have not moved much: Troll — 8/10; Troll 2 — 7.5/10. The difference is that I now see them less as one very good monster movie followed by a respectable sequel, and more as the beginning of a genuinely coherent little mythology about memory, landscape and the danger of assuming that an old story is harmless simply because nobody believes it anymore.
And yes, after all of that, I would still watch a third one. I might just give myself a night between films next time.
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