Mark Reviews Movies: OUT STEALING HORSES

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

It is 1999. While this is the unofficial dawn of a new millennium, with uncertain hopes and unknown tragedies awaiting people and the world at large, an older man is lost in thought and memory. He lives alone in a cabin, somewhere outside of a small town in Norway. The man has wanted to live in isolation like this for a long time, and now, with his wife a few years and no other family to tend to (at least that we knows or he thinks about for most of the story), Trond (Sellan Skarsgård) has bought this place and decides to take advantage of the silence by doing nothing much at all.

This is the setup of Out Stealing Horses, which focuses on two periods of the main character's life—his present seclusion and a summer as a teenager—and very gradually reveals many events that ultimately lead up to, well, nothing much at all. To be fair, writer/director Hans Petter Moland's movie isn't really about big, character-defining revelations. It's more about how much can happen and be revealed over the course of a life, and despite all of that, the young man still becomes old and still just sits around not doing much at all, except to ponder how he got here and what it all means.

That we leave the movie with a basic idea about how Trond got here—a man locked up in a cabin while an eventful summer with his father unfolds in his mind—is its primary goal. As for what it all means, the fact that we have no clue is apparently another of Moland's aims. Things happened. They reveal other things that happened before those things. A whole life was lived, and now, an older man just dawdles about remembering all of those previous things. It's melancholy and rather bluntly honest, for sure. It's also befuddling and entirely anti-climactic.

The events, at least, are intriguing, especially since we keep hoping that Moland's screenplay (based on Per Petterson's 2005 novel of the same name) will find some way to connect what Trond had seen, learned, and experienced since that particular summer of his youth. That promise seems even more tantalizing considering the present-day story's central, very convenient contrivance. Trond isn't entirely alone in this part of his little swatch of land. He has a neighbor—a man whom he hasn't seen or maybe even thought about in nearly 50 years.

That neighbor is named Lars (Bjørn Floberg). The man also lives a secluded life, with only a dog—and now Trond—to keep him company. The dog keeps running away, and Lars has considered shooting it. He doesn't want to, because one of his most devastating memories is of shooting a stray dog. Trond is convinced that this Lars is a Lars he knew as a teenager, and if that's true, a dog isn't the only living thing that his new neighbor has shot.

Most of this overarching story takes place in 1948, when a 15-year-old Trond (Jon Ranes) spent a summer with his father (Tobias Santelmann) at a cabin in the woods. We also discover that this summer would be the last time that Trond ever saw his father.

There's plenty of tragedy that befalls the assorted characters in the past. Apart from one early misfortune, though, most of it is just life proceeding with people choosing one love, loyalty, or obligation over some other one or ones.

Trond has spent a lot of time on his vacation with a nearby farmer's eldest son Jon (Sjur Vatne Brean). They "steal" local horses, just to ride them. One day, Jon is clearly distraught, and a flashback reveals how he fatally failed his younger twin brothers. The fallout of that gradually reveals more history, involving Trond's father, the farmer's wife (Danica Curcic), and the farmer himself (Pål Sverre Hagen).

One cannot reveal too much, not only because Moland's screenplay relies on the slow dissemination of information, but also because so much happens and is revealed over the course of these lengthy flashbacks. We learn about a possible affair, the parents' participation—or the lack thereof—in the resistance against the Nazi occupation, and what might have happened to keep Trond's father from ever returning home.

In the present, we learn a bit—and only a bit—about Trond's own past: a wife who died and only one other relative, who arrives right at the end of the movie. It's a shock, obviously, because Trond's experiences in the cabin seem stuck in the past. We realize how little we actually know about him.

That could be Moland's ultimate point with Out Stealing Horses—that, like Trond's knowledge of his father and our knowledge of Trond, we never really know what is in another person's heart and mind (The surprise character gets Trond to make that exact observation in voice-over narration). That may be true and sad and, as is Trond's experience, lead to many sleepless nights, but it also seems such a simple, uncomplicated, and rather underwhelming conclusion to make at the end of a story that has so much to show and so little to say.

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