Director: Óskar Thór Axelsson
Buried Nazi gold, a decades-old cover-up, and a lawyer who stumbles into both: Operation Napoleon turns a frozen Icelandic glacier into the setting for a modern chase.
What is Operation Napoleon about?
Kristín, a young attorney in Reykjavik, is framed for a killing she had nothing to do with. The only way to clear her name is to chase down the truth behind a German military aircraft that vanished into the ice near the end of the Second World War. As she digs, current-day officials with their own reasons to keep the wreck buried start closing in, and the CIA is only one of several parties racing to reach it first. What begins as a legal nightmare turns into a cross-country pursuit through some of Iceland's most unforgiving terrain.
Cast & crew
Vivian Ólafsdóttir anchors the film as the lawyer forced into the investigation, working opposite Jack Fox and Iain Glen as figures with murkier motives. Wotan Wilke Möhring, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Atli Óskar Fjalarsson, Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson and Nanna Kristín Magnúsdóttir round out a cast drawn largely from Icelandic and German film and television, giving the production a lived-in regional texture rather than an imported one.
Context & significance
Director Óskar Thór Axelsson, known for Icelandic crime television, adapts Arnaldur Indriðason's novel of the same name, trading the author's usual Reykjavik detective work for a wider, glacier-spanning thriller. The 2023 co-production between Germany and Iceland leans on its landscape as much as its plot, using the country's ice fields and coastline as a backdrop that few English-language thrillers get to use. At 112 minutes, the pacing favors steady escalation over rapid-fire action.
Where & how to watch
Operation Napoleon streams on K-Time with a Persian-dubbed audio track, alongside the original language where available. Access requires a free K-Time account login; the film's page itself is open to read without signing in. The K-Time interface is built around Farsi navigation and search, so members can browse the wider thriller catalog entirely in their own language before pressing play.