‘King of Devil’s Island” is one of three end-of-the-year films starring the excellent Swedish-born actor Stellan Skarsgård, also featured in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “Melancholia.”

In “King,” he plays the warden at Bastoy, a brutally run school for “maladjusted boys” aged 11 to 18 on a wind-swept island off the coast of Norway.

Set in 1915, the movie opens with the arrival of a new inmate, the rebellious Erling (Benjamin Helstad), who’s determined to break out of Bastoy, and ends with a bloody rebellion and a thrilling fight for life on a frozen sea of ice. In between are many of the conventions of movies about sadistic prisons — sexual abuse, suicide and unsuccessful escapes. But director Marius Holst gives the proceedings a fresh look, thanks to sturdy acting, direction and cinematography.

The real-life Bastoy operated as a penal colony for boys from 1900 to 1953. It’s since been reinvented as “the first ecological prison in the world.” Inmates live in wooded cottages and have access to cable TV, horseback riding, cross-country skiing and tennis.