Variety film critic Dennis Harvey reviews "No Rest for the Wicked," the debut feature from Danish director Kaspar Kalle, premiering at the Fantasia Festival. The film is a supernatural romantic drama set in a remote Faroe Islands fishing village in 1862, adapted from an 1884 story by German author Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, an early gay rights advocate, and blends love story with horror before resolving into a melancholy tone likened to "Brokeback Mountain" and "All of Us Strangers."

The plot follows Baldur (Egor Venned), a taciturn young fisherman, who is rescued by shipwrecked sailor Helge (Pilou Asbaek), sparking a passionate bond that alarms Baldur's widowed mother, Asla (Sofia Nolsoe). After Helge drowns at sea and Baldur makes a desperate blood wish for his return, his exhumed corpse is found unnervingly warm and undecayed, and a strange contagion begins spreading through the village, raising questions about whether Helge has become a vampiric force of evil. The review praises the film's atmosphere while noting some unevenness, tracing its source material's origins to a brief 1884 tale by Ulrichs.