Richard Holm’s disaster film turns Kiruna, the Arctic town really being moved because its iron mine is undermining the ground, into the stage for a collapse, with Tuva Novotny as the mine’s security chief caught between the emergency and her family.

The Abyss (Avgrunden in the original Swedish) is a disaster film built on a premise that sounds invented but is not: a town in the far north of Sweden that has to be moved because the mine beneath it is eating away the ground. Richard Holm directs, Tuva Novotny leads the cast as the head of security at the Kiruna iron mine, and the story asks what happens when the slow, managed collapse everyone in town has learned to live with suddenly stops being slow.

SF Studios released the film in Swedish cinemas on 15 September 2023, and Netflix launched it worldwide on 16 February 2024. Its producers presented it as the first large-scale Swedish disaster movie. It runs 103 minutes, is spoken in Swedish and was made for around 90 million kronor, a large budget for a Nordic production and a modest one by the standards of the Hollywood genre it borrows from.

A mining town with a real fault line

Kiruna is not a set. The town sits beside Kiirunavaara, the mountain where the state-owned company LKAB has mined iron ore since the early twentieth century, and the operation is described as the largest underground iron-ore mine in the world. What began as an open pit moved underground in the middle of the last century; the main haulage level completed in 2017 lies 1,365 metres below the mountain’s original summit, and the deepest workings go further still.

That depth has a cost on the surface. The ore body slopes down beneath the town, and as mining follows it, the ground above cracks and subsides. In 2004 it became clear that the fractures were moving towards the town, and the decision was taken to move it: homes, public buildings and a large part of the old centre have been relocated a few kilometres east in a process that has run for two decades. The mine has also known real accidents, including fatal rockfalls in 2006 and 2008.

The Abyss takes that slow-motion reality and speeds it up. The film’s own promotional line sums up the premise: everyone in Kiruna knows something is going to happen; the only question is when. The screenplay answers with a collapse inside the mine that leaves people trapped below ground while the town above begins to give way.

What the story is about

Frigga Vibenius, played by Tuva Novotny, is the mine’s security chief, a job that makes her the person paid to imagine the worst. The official synopsis frames her life as a balancing act: risky work underground, her family, a new relationship and a former partner who will not let go. When the ground begins to shake, that personal juggling stops mattering and the struggle turns physical, a fight not to be dragged down into the abyss of the title.

Around her the film builds a family and a workplace. Peter Franzén plays Tage Vibenius, Felicia Truedsson (also credited as Felicia Maxime) plays Mika Vibenius and Edvin Ryding plays Simon Vibenius. Kardo Razzazi plays Dabir Ayobi, Angela Kovács plays Erika Svalin and Tintin Poggats Sarri plays Aila. The structure the synopsis lays out puts Frigga’s household and her job inside the same emergency, and that is where the film stakes its drama.

Disaster cinema has always run on two engines: the spectacle of the event and the private stories of the people caught in it. Hollywood’s Greenland (2020), built around one family’s escape from a comet strike, is a recent example of the formula. The Abyss, by its own description, puts the second engine in charge. The collapse is the event, but the story it tells is about a woman trying to hold a family together while doing a job whose whole purpose is to stop disasters from happening. That choice is the axis on which opinions about the film tend to split.

Richard Holm, from Johan Falk to the mine

Richard Holm, born in Stockholm in 1967, came to The Abyss from Swedish crime and action filmmaking. He directed several instalments of the Johan Falk series, including Johan Falk: Leo Gaut in 2009 and the 2015 trio Ur askan i elden, Lockdown and Slutet, as well as one of the Fjällbacka murders films. On television he worked on Gåsmamman, Heder and Maskineriet. Before moving into directing, he spent years as an assistant director on Swedish productions, among them several Beck films.

He wrote the screenplay with his son, Robin Sherlock Holm, and with Nicola Sinclair. The producer is Joakim Hansson, who created the Johan Falk character with Anders Nilsson in 1998 and produced films such as Jägarna and Livvakterna. Anders Nilsson also appears among the editors of The Abyss, alongside Holm himself and Thomas Lagerman. The team, in other words, comes from the core of one of Sweden’s most durable action franchises, here trying a different genre on a bigger canvas.

A cast from Sweden and Finland

Tuva Novotny is one of the most internationally travelled Swedish actors of her generation. She broke through in the soap Skilda världar in the late 1990s, has worked in Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom and beyond, and has her own career behind the camera: she directed episodes of the Norwegian series Dag and Lilyhammer, made her debut as a feature director with Blind Spot in 2018 and followed it in 2019 with Britt-Marie var här, adapted from Fredrik Backman’s novel.

Peter Franzén brings a Finnish presence that matches the film’s co-production. Born in 1971 and raised in Keminmaa in northern Finland, he is best known internationally as King Harald Finehair in Vikings and has also appeared in The Wheel of Time. At home he won a Jussi Award for best actor for Dog Nail Clipper, and he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Above Dark Waters.

Kardo Razzazi, born in Uppsala in 1985, is a familiar face in Swedish film and television, from Ali Abbasi’s Border to the series Heder, Alex and Top Dog, as well as Fatih Akin’s Rheingold. Edvin Ryding became known worldwide in 2021 as Prince Wilhelm in Netflix’s Young Royals, a series in which Felicia Truedsson also appeared. Their presence gives The Abyss a younger generation of actors with an international streaming audience already attached.

Shot in Kiruna and Tampere

Filming took place in 2022, in Kiruna itself and in Finland, where underground scenes were shot at Sandvik’s test mine in Tampere; further scenes were filmed in Stockholm, Brussels and Gran Canaria. The Finnish leg alone cost about 1.5 million euros. SF Studios produced with Filmpool Nord, Film Tampere, Mjölk Movies, Business Finland and Seven Islands Film, with additional backing tied to the Gran Canaria Film Commission and the Spanish tax rebate.

The craft credits are Nordic throughout. Anssi Leino is the director of photography, Lasse Enersen composed the score and Hilda Junker designed the costumes. The most visible recognition went to the effects: at the Guldbagge Awards in January 2024, Sweden’s national film prizes, Nora Berecoechea and Stefan Rycken won best visual effects for The Abyss, ahead of the teams behind Hammarskjöld and Konferensen.

From Swedish cinemas to Netflix

In Finland, where it opened a week after Sweden under the title Kiiruna, the film sold a little over 8,000 tickets. Its second life came on Netflix. After its release on the service on 16 February 2024, The Abyss reached a far wider audience than its theatrical run had, with roughly 30 million views reported across its first two weeks, a pattern Nordic genre cinema knows well: modest at the box office, much larger once it streams.

That reach also places the film inside a small Scandinavian tradition with a clear lineage. Norway’s The Wave (2015) and The Quake (2018) showed that a Nordic production could stage a national catastrophe with credible effects while keeping the focus on one family. The Abyss follows that template, swapping the fjord and the earthquake for a mine and a town that is already, in real life, being moved out of the way.

Our take

On paper, The Abyss has two things few disaster films can claim: a setting where the danger is not hypothetical, and a production that took its effects seriously enough to win the national prize for them. Its limits are written into the same premise. By choosing a family story as its frame, it asks the audience to care about a household’s tensions at the very moment the ground opens, and whether that pays off depends on how much patience a viewer has for drama between the set pieces.

For anyone curious about Nordic genre cinema, about the real story of Kiruna or about seeing Tuva Novotny and Peter Franzén share a film, it is a curious entry, with its documented strengths sitting exactly where a big-budget Swedish experiment would want them. For those who come to disaster films only for scale, its own synopsis already makes clear which side of the balance it chose.