Iceman exclusive trailer attempts to solve a 5,000-year-old murder mystery

Who killed the oldest-known human mummy in existence? One filmmaker has a theory

He may have been dead for over 5,000 years, but the mummified Neolithic male known as Ötzi has found his own kind of celebrity.

Discovered in 1991 by two hikers in the Ötztal Alps in southern Tyrol, he's the oldest-known human mummy in existence, coincidentally preserved in ice so that his skin - covered in over 60 tattoos - and organs remained intact. He swiftly became an international fascination.

And now, Ötzi gets his own biopic: German filmmaker Felix Randau has turned his life - and his death, felled by an arrow that caused him to hit his head on a stone and bleed to death - into a full-blooded survival adventure to rival The Revenant, with a murder-mystery spin.

In its quest for realism, its cast - including star Jürgen Vogel, who plays Ötzi, named Kelab in the film - speak a now-extinct language, with viewers not even cushioned by subtitles: an early version of Rhaetic, spoken in the Eastern Alps in the pre-Roman and Roman period.

The film was also shot in the South Tyrol, mere kilometres from where the mummy was found; his body is now housed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

It imagines Kelab on a quest for revenge to seek out those who slaughtered his clan and burnt their village to the ground, traversing the snowy mountains in single-minded pursuit.

Iceman hits cinemas and on demand services 27 July.

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