"It's also a story about art and artists betraying people," says veteran actor Josephson, "and about people's needs to believe in things and their frustration when believing goes wrong. Even when the magician is a fake, he's a fake in a good way. People want to have fairytales, to have experiences that are not so rational."

Maria with the 'magnetist', Friedrich Meisner (Ole Lemmeke).

A quintessentially Scandinavian film - a Swedish novel adapted by a Dane, with Swedish, Norwegian and Danish actors - The Magnetist's Fifth Winter was filmed in Norway, with the historic wooden settlement of Røros, about 400 kilometres north of Oslo, standing in for the Swedish town in which Enquist set his novel. Already used in the Pippi Longstocking TV series, Røros made the actors feel, says Lassgård, "like being back 200 years in time. It reminded me of my childhood winters, when you see the Northern Lights and there's smoke on your breath."

It wasn't all idyllic, of course. "On the second-to-last day," recalls Lense-Møller, "we were shooting up there and it was very, very stormy weather. Really, the only sensible thing would have been to cancel the shoot. But everybody wanted to finish and go home, so we all agreed to go through with it anyway - except the horse pulling the sledge in the final shot. It completely refused to walk and lay down in the middle of the mountain - the only sensible person on the entire crew!"

For all the realism of its setting, however, The Magnetist's Fifth Winter has ambitions beyond mere realism. "We didn't want to make it look too old-fashioned just because it is a period film," says director of photography Dirk Brüel. "We tried to do a lot of movement, using tracks in nearly every sequence. And I prefer not to cut too much, so there is continuous movement and action."

Brüel also developed a very careful colour scheme, contrasting the drabness of the townspeople's lives with the colour that Meisner brings in with him. "With his scenes," he explains, "I tried to convey the sensuality, the seduction. It's like a circus in a way: a foreign element that comes into the town, bringing life and colour. The everyday reality is very greyish, straight and even; and then, all of a sudden, this intruder comes in and expands their world for a brief moment; then goes away again."

For Henriksen, despite the fact that it is set in 1819 and all the characters wear period costumes, The Magnetist's Fifth Winter is a 'modern' film, with a very definite message for a modern audience: otherwise, he would have had no interest in adapting it.

"To me," he says, "the novel is a watershed. It is one of the best - if not the best - Scandinavian prognosis of what awaits us in the near future - maybe just round the next bend. I think the novel is a high-tension cable hooking up to the past, at the very point where the present also does so. I can scarcely imagine a more up-to-date, relevant project. But then I am also partly under Friedrich Meisner's spell!"

PHOTOS: Bård Løvvig, Nils Petter Lotherington