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THE MOUNTAIN (2019)
Director: Rick Alverson Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jeff Goldblum, Hannah Gross, Denis Lavant, Udo Kier, Annemarie Lawless, Eleonore Hendricks MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:46 Release Date: 7/26/19 (limited); 9/28/19 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2019 Until the third act, co-writer/director Rick Alverson's The Mountain is the right kind of inscrutable. The story is quite simple. The two main characters, though, remain a puzzle. We understand their motives and behavior, but the movie understands that their hope for some truth is a seemingly insurmountable quest. For Andy (Tye Sheridan), who's essentially orphaned when his emotionally absent father (played by Udo Kier) dies, the goal is to discover what happened to his mother, who was sent to a psychiatric institution. He could learn the answer from Dr. Wally Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), who offers Andy a job. The doctor, who treated Andy's mother, is touring the country to offer his services to various psychiatric facilities. He wants a photographer to capture the work for posterity. The work is performing lobotomies. It's some time in the 1950s, and the rest of the movie has the duo traveling along various wooded roads to assorted institutions. The topic of Andy's mother arises only once or twice. When the young man asks if the doctor performed a lobotomy on her, Wally doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. In watching the doctor lobotomize patient after patient, the only question that remains for Andy is what happens to a person whose brain has been hammered with a sharp spike. Meanwhile, Wally may talk about the benefits of his services, but he spends his evenings drinking too much and flirting with every woman who crosses his path. Alverson's approach is entirely about creating an aura of melancholy, from the internally tortured faces of his actors to the muted colors that seem to define every place along the pair's tour. The filmmaker succeeds quite well in this regard, and the horrors of the doctor's work are upsetting on their own and, in an oddly appropriate way, juxtaposed with the emotional voids that define the protagonists. This sentiment—that emotions are things to be suppressed—becomes vital to the story's climactic turn. The established mood continues through the whole of the movie, but that third act, defined by the rantings of the father (played by Denis Lavant) of one of Wally's patients (played by Hannah Gross), desperately tries to frame a tone poem of despair as something more significant. In the end, The Mountain doesn't fully trust how effective the creating and maintaining of such an overwhelming atmosphere actually are. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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