It’s always a challenge for successive endeavours to match up to a famous debut. Asif Kapadia, a British director of Indian origin, realised it after his first feature film, The Warrior. However, with Far North, based on a short story by Sarah Maitland, he found the most appropriate project to follow up the success of his 2001 film.

Far North, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, is also the 36-year-old director’s most potent means to send shivers down the audience’s spine. The thriller, after its outings at the Berlin and London film festivals — is out to achieve a similar effect with its release in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

“Writer Tim Miller and I love folk tales and classic fairy stories. This one had the same special feeling, although the lead character’s journey is complex and dark,” says Kapadia about Far North. The film brought Miller and Kapadia together again — reviving the writing collaboration of The Warrior. This also meant working jointly to turn Maitland’s short story that is only six pages long into a riveting screenplay.

Like The Warrior, Far North is set in an inhospitable, but spectacular wilderness. And what Rajasthan did in Kapadia’s debut film, the harsh terrain of the Arctic does in his latest by becoming as integral to the story as the characters. “The idea was to explore how two women live on ice in the middle of nowhere and surviving on whatever they can kill,” says Kapadia. The film, starring Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Krusiec and Sean Bean, was filmed in extreme conditions in the Arctic for over four years.

In Far North, Saiva (Yeoh), the sole survivor of an indigenous tribe of reindeer herders, is living under a curse with Anja (Krusiec), her adopted daughter, in a remote land. After the fugitive Loki (Bean) appears, things change as Saiva and Anja compete for his attention. As the passion between Loki and Anja deepens, they plan to leave Saiva to start a new life together. When the lovers are about to leave, Saiva acts with horrific consequences.

Shooting the film was tough, given the weather. “We couldn’t shoot in the summer because there’s no snow. We couldn’t shoot in the winter because there’s no daylight, which only left autumn. But in the autumn there are no roads in this place. The sea is not frozen so you can’t drive over there, you have to travel everywhere by boat. So the only way we could do the shoot was by living on a boat,” says Kapadia.