(Critic’s Pick)

Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s “Woman at War” is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching. The package is lumpy at times, but not unwieldy, thanks to an engaging central performance and a cinematographer, Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson, whose sweeping shots of frozen heath and lowering Icelandic skies wash the screen — and our minds — of extraneous distractions.

The movie’s heart and spine is Halla (Halldora Geirharosdottir), 50, a sunny choir director and fearless eco-activist. Intent on halting the construction of a new aluminum smelter outside Reykjavik, she sabotages power lines and demolishes the drones deployed to deter her. So far, she has eluded capture despite increasingly daring exploits, and when we see no partner or family other than an identical twin sister (also played by Geirharosdottir), we wonder if her adventures are filling more than just a need to save her homeland.

The arrival of a letter announcing that her application to adopt a child, filed years earlier, has been approved, strengthens that suspicion. Yet as Halla teeters between motherhood and vandalism — between creation and destruction — her embrace of the natural world intensifies. A dead sheep’s carcass shields her from helicopters, and, later, hot springs revive her frozen body. Often she’s pictured moving through water or clinging to the earth, face buried in gorse and arms flung wide, as if trying to stop her world from spinning.

Surreal touches, like pop-up musicians only Halla can see, give the movie’s politics a playful, fairy-tale cast, but “Woman at War” is more captivated by Halla’s internal struggle. Should she raise a child or change the world? Or can the first achieve the second?

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Additional Information

‘Woman at War’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.