Kormakur's film suggests that the enigma of Gulli can somehow be found in his peasant humility, his connections to his community.

Even knowing the outcome ... doesn't diminish the intensity and awe of watching it recreated in this deftly framed docudrama by prodigious Icelandic auteur Kormakur.

[Gulli's] story's pretty remarkable. But this film achieves a real kind of lonely magic when he's bobbing on the waves under the night sky, talking to a gull.

Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is spectacular in such a difficult performance, one that purely relies on body language to show the depths of pain this guy went through to survive.