Forbidden love takes on eldritch elemental power in Kasper Kalle’s resonant period horror film
Based on Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ pioneering 1884 gay novella Manor, No Rest for the Wicked follows Baldur (Egor Venned), a quiet fisherman who lives with his widowed mother Àsla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) in the remote, storm-battered Faroe Islands. After rugged whaler Helge (Pilou Asbæk) saves Baldur from drowning, the two spark a romance they must hide from their conservative, devout community. When their attempt to run away together ends in Helge’s death, Baldur’s grief-striken pleas to the sea to bring him back eventually reveals how their bond defies the limits of faith, judgment, and death.
Kasper Kalle’s timely film pulses with deliriously haunting passion, with Venned and Asbæk’s undeniable chemistry a primal challenge to the demands of vampire lore and tragic queer romance.
From the start, Kalle immerses viewers in a world that requires immense resilience. Suffocated by the foggy ocean between Iceland and Scotland, the Faroe Islands are defined by their unforgiving nature. To wit, little grows naturally on these islands: islanders build their boats, homes, and tools from the shipwreck timber washing ashore. Likewise, the dead are not spared coffins, instead wrapped in sails (or bedsheets) repurposed as shrouds. Life here means steeling body and spirit against the elements, which makes it all the more unsettling–and, deeper down, thrilling–when forces stronger than nature creep in and take hold.
That tension between belief, the body, and the beyond is one Kalle dazzlingly depicts as No Rest for the Wicked’s runtime unfolds. Jacob Møller’s cinematography frequently places all three at war with one another: a sprawling cemetery dwarfed by seaside mountains, blood and ocean swirling together as bodies suspend underwater, driftwood crucifixes staking vampiric victims to the earth, and graves that supernaturally flood.
Release, in all its forms, arrives in the love scenes. The characters’ resilient survival instincts already make No Rest for the Wicked compelling, but Kalle elevates it as Baldur and Helge’s forbidden romance becomes the one thing that seems to flourish naturally on the island. Kalle and Møller draw us into the lovers’ primal desire, the hard-bitten isolation of earlier scenes giving way to warm, body-grinding intimacy. Even before the film’s darker, eldritch turns, these moments are charged with the queer subtext of vampirism, these men’s desires irrevocably bleeding into the subversion of faith, social mores, and kinkier taboos. Their romance also creates space for a vulnerability that the harsh environment suppresses even without the weight of religious conservatism, both forces creating a feedback loop of repression broken only by these deeper, more forbidden bonds.
Asbæk and Venned seem so naturally paired in Kalle’s film. Both men feel so worn down from years of stormy weather, and they fumble endearingly toward affection as if relearning intimacy from scratch. Asbæk, whom viewers may know best as a more villainous seafarer from Game of Thrones, is an immediate draw–he infuses Helge with such potent yet conflicted yearning, someone once resigned to life adrift now shaken by a reason to plant roots. Venned, primarily a model, spends much of No Rest for the Wicked upending the tropes of his role. Rather than a stranger awakening a sheltered young man to his desires, Baldur takes a surprisingly commanding lead in the romance, a dynamic that carries over into how the two treat each other once the film turns supernatural. It’s also worth shouting out Mikkelsen’s Àsla, a nuanced portrayal of a mother conflicted over her son’s behavior while also sorting through repressed (and rejected) desires of her own.
What makes No Rest for the Wicked such a memorable watch is the magnetic, matter-of-fact way Kalle treats the elemental power of this otherworldly romance. He externalizes the lovers’ undying bond through hypnotic command of water, earth, and air–while Mads Michael Olsen and Mark Bukdahl’s editing elliptically drawing ethereal connections between the lovers’ vampiric union and the brimming fury of the world that traps them. That formal connection underscores how futile it is for the living to contain them, whether by stakes or ceremony. If the islanders’ first response is to bury its gays, the land and sea itself seems to rebuke them by providing these lovers with rebellious resurrection.
As Queer expression finds itself challenged on all sides socially and artistically, No Rest for the Wicked revives a long-buried Queer horror text to create a period horror film with striking modern relevance, and empowers vampire tropes with passionate elemental fury and tender vulnerability.
No Rest for the Wicked revives a long-buried work of gay horror as a period piece with striking modern relevance, reimagining the vampire tale with passionate, elemental fury and tender vulnerability.
No Rest for the Wicked had its U.S. Premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, with a domestic distributor to be announced in the coming weeks.
