The House That Health Forgot
There’s something inherently terrifying about hospitals. The smell of antiseptic, the buzzing fluorescent lights, the soft murmur of distant suffering — it’s enough to make anyone pray for good health. Now imagine that same hospital abandoned, decaying in the middle of a fog-drenched Norwegian forest, and still somehow less depressing than the average Monday. Welcome to Villmark Asylum (Villmark 2 if you’re counting corpses), a darkly elegant Norwegian horror film that manages to make industrial cleanup feel like a descent into hell — with paperwork.
Director Pål Øie, returning from his 2003 cult hit Dark Woods (Villmark), crafts a standalone sequel that takes the old “haunted sanitarium” trope and gives it a distinctly Scandinavian flavor — slow, cold, and existentially damp. It’s like The Shining met Chernobyl at a silent retreat and forgot how to leave.
Plot: Ghostbusters on Union Wages
The premise is deceptively simple: five contract workers are hired to clean out an abandoned mountain sanatorium before it’s demolished. Their mission? Neutralize lingering toxins, check over 300 rooms, and survive for three days in a facility that clearly hates them.
Leading the group is Live (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a pragmatic professional whose calm composure slowly unravels as the building begins to flex its ghostly muscles. She’s joined by Synne (Renate Reinsve, before she won Cannes for The Worst Person in the World), Ole (Anders Baasmo), Even (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen), and the world’s most unsettling janitor, Karl (Baard Owe), who watches over the building like it’s an ex he can’t let go of.
Things start as a dirty job — scraping toxic residue, fixing pipes, and ignoring the general sense that they’re trespassing on cursed ground. But when a burst water main floods the lower levels, the group descends into the sanatorium’s labyrinthine basement to fix the problem.
Bad idea.
What follows is part ghost story, part survival thriller, and part occupational hazard. The deeper they go, the more the building reveals its secrets — and its resentment for being disturbed. The result is claustrophobic, wet, and beautifully insane, like a plumbing emergency directed by H.P. Lovecraft.
The Setting: Norway’s Creepiest Airbnb
The film’s real star isn’t a person — it’s the location. Villmark Asylum was filmed in the actual Harastølen Sanatorium, a massive, decaying relic from the early 1900s. This is the kind of place that doesn’t need CGI to be terrifying; the wallpaper is already peeling in the shape of screaming faces.
The sanatorium sits in the middle of nowhere — literally. It’s perched high in the mountains, surrounded by fog and pine trees that look like they’ve seen too much. Every corridor groans. Every door sighs. The building feels alive, and it’s tiredof your renovation plans.
Cinematographer Pål Bugge Haagenrud treats the location like a character — one that’s plotting your death. The camera moves slowly through corridors, lingers on rusting pipes, and stares too long at empty wheelchairs. The decaying grandeur gives the whole film a tragic beauty. It’s haunted, yes — but mostly by the memory of better days and properly functioning plumbing.
Performances: Nordic Despair, Deluxe Edition
Ellen Dorrit Petersen gives a hauntingly restrained performance as Live. She’s not your typical horror protagonist — no screaming, no hysterics, just mounting dread behind professional resolve. You can see the moment when her “We can handle this” attitude transitions into “We should’ve burned this place to the ground.”
Renate Reinsve, even before becoming Norway’s cinematic darling, shows star quality as Synne, the team’s empathetic yet fragile member. Her scenes in the flooded basement are some of the most chilling — equal parts ghost encounter and panic attack.
Baard Owe, as Karl the janitor, deserves special mention. He’s the kind of character who could make reading a maintenance log sound ominous. He’s both protector and potential threat — a man who knows too much about the building and maybe about what’s living in it.
Anders Baasmo and Mads Pettersen round out the team with a grounded realism that makes the supernatural even more unsettling. They don’t overact or wink at the audience — they just look like people who deeply regret signing that three-day contract.
Tone: Existential Terror, Served Cold
Unlike Hollywood horror, which often relies on quick shocks and buckets of blood, Villmark Asylum opts for slow-burn dread. This is a film that makes you feel the cold, the damp, and the oppressive weight of history pressing in from all sides. It’s patient horror — the kind that waits for you to notice the movement in the background and then question your own sanity.
There’s also a sly dark humor at work here. The idea of bureaucrats and contractors trying to “sanitize” a haunted asylum is inherently absurd — as if ghosts respect health and safety regulations. One can almost imagine a spectral foreman handing out hard hats and muttering, “We’ve had zero workplace fatalities since the plague, let’s keep it that way.”
The humor never breaks the mood; it just adds to the absurdity of human arrogance in the face of nature and the supernatural. You don’t conquer old places like this — you just survive their indifference.
Themes: What Lies Beneath
Beneath the scares, Villmark Asylum is about contamination — physical, emotional, and moral. The workers are there to clean up toxins, but the real poison seeps from the walls, from the memories, from the sins that can’t be scrubbed away. It’s not just about haunted spaces — it’s about haunted people.
As the characters descend deeper into the asylum, they also descend into themselves. The labyrinth becomes psychological, the flooding symbolic — guilt, grief, and fear rising faster than they can pump it out. It’s classic horror dressed in modern overalls.
And in true Scandinavian fashion, the film doesn’t offer neat answers. You’re left unsure whether the ghosts are real or just the echoes of the building’s grim past — tuberculosis patients, war refugees, the forgotten souls of a welfare state that’s really bad at aftercare.
Visuals and Sound: The Church of Claustrophobia
The cinematography is breathtaking — and by “breathtaking,” I mean you’ll feel short of breath from how claustrophobic it gets. The flashlight beams slicing through darkness, the steady drip of water echoing like a metronome of doom — it’s a sensory experience.
The sound design is equally brilliant. Every creak, hiss, and gurgle is its own jump scare. The pipes seem to whisper. The air itself hums. It’s less a soundtrack and more a séance recorded on industrial equipment.
Even the score avoids bombast. It’s minimalist, eerie, and perfectly tuned to make you question whether that noise came from the film or from your own ceiling.
Final Verdict: Terror With a Touch of Plumbing
Villmark Asylum is that rare horror sequel that doesn’t rely on nostalgia or cheap tricks. It’s elegant, intelligent, and confidently eerie — a film that understands that what’s unseen is always scarier than what jumps out.
Yes, it’s slow. Yes, it’s gloomy. But that’s the point. This isn’t a rollercoaster — it’s a slow elevator descent into madness. By the time the characters reach the basement, you’ll be gripping your armrest and reconsidering every renovation show you’ve ever watched.
It’s Norway’s answer to The Descent, filtered through the melancholic beauty of Bergman and the industrial terror of Event Horizon. And unlike most horror films, it doesn’t end with a scream — it ends with the steady, haunting drip of inevitability.
Grade: A–
Recommended for: Fans of slow-burn horror, anyone who finds comfort in existential dread, and those who think “extreme cleaning” should be a subgenre of terror.
