(courtesy IMDb)
What happens when you assemble all the tropes and cliches of a particular genre and a decent film forgets to turn up?
You get Fjallið (The Mountain).
An Icelandic film written and directed by Ásthildur Kjartansdóttir, Fjallið (The Mountain) looks for all the world like the sort of film that will have something thoughtful and emotionally rich to say about grief and how it takes you over in ways you never even see coming.
For many of us, it’s like nothing we have ever experienced before, a tsunami of loss and pain that has no easy fix, no simple remedy and which overwhelms in such seismically intense ways that even functioning in a basic day-to-day fashion feels all but impossible.
As someone who lost both his parents in the last decade, this reviewer knows there is a lot of real emotional truth to be mined from these sorts of periods, and yet somehow Fjallið (The Mountain) manages to somehow stay surface despite every indication it is prepared to go as deep as needs to tell what looks to be an incisively affecting story.
Set in a town not far from the capital Reykjavík, the film possesses the sort of introspectively ruminative feel that a story dedicated to going deep into the human condition often has well in hand – the narrative is not in an unseemly rush to get anywhere, the characters are given time to breathe (though in retrospect not as much as required to establish that any of these people mean anything to each other) and the camera pans across landscapes, interior and wildly exterior with the air of an unhurried visitor taking in the sights.
If you have lost yourselves in movies of this nature before, you could be forgiven for thinking that here comes something worth falling into and losing yourself in for an hour and a half.
And yet for all its visual and narrative pretensions to going somewhere truly thoughtful and moving, Fjallið (The Mountain) instead becomes a far more surfacey ticking of the boxes, an assembling of pieces so expected they telegraph every single moment well in advance, as if they have read how you assemble a film based on grief and have gone and bought all the pieces right off the rack.
The pity is that given time and a little more care in framing the characters, that we might have cared far more for those at the centre of the story.
María (Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir) is a teacher at a school and what looks to be an amateur astronomer who is excited when her close and careful observations of the night sky scans reveal a hitherto unknown comet; to verify it is what she thinks it is, she will need to go to the north of the country to a remote cabin the family maintains – or it could be a communal one though that is never made clear; all we know is María and her family holidayed there a lot in days gone past – and spend the weekend capturing shot of her discovery.
She arrives home ready to pack and leave for the weekend only to discover that her taciturn husband, Atli (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) has to work the weekend for a difficult client who has a Monday deadline for his bar opening, and her daughter, Anna (Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney) has a major gig booked for her band that she can’t miss.
It’s clear that María is angry and disappointed, going to bed without one of the trademark dinners Atli loves to cook, but neither Atli nor Anna going to any great lengths to remedy their oversight of a big family weekend away that’s long been in the calendar.
The idea, of course, is that these two people will have huge things to regret later on as the story progresses, not that this is obvious at this point but all you get at this point is that here is a family that was once close but which is now spinning out of each other’s orbit.
Atli makes small reparations by methodically and, you presume, lovingly, curating a delicious sandwich for his wife, who leaves on her trip ready to make the discovery of the lifetime without the very people who would grant it extra meaning (though this is supposed as not much in the story indicates that the family really means that much to each other anymore).
So underplayed is this scene that any emotional impact from Atli and Anna’s thoughtlessness is lost in the narrative wash, and unfortunately, this low key emotionalism continues on throughout the greater part of Fjallið (The Mountain) and renders even the most box ticking of story beats largely inert and lacking in any real impact.
The only part of the movie where there is anything approaching measurably impactful emotion is when Atli and Anna journey to the titular mountain of the film in a bid to take the photos that María was never able to take.
Here we see Atli, who reacts to his grief in some fairly obvious and clumsily executed ways – abuse your boss? Tick! Pick a fight at the bar? Tick? Drink too much and be nasty to those you love? Also tick! – finally cry and break down and he and Anna fight about their decisions on the day María left on her fateful journey.
Alas, they are crammed into the final 15-20 minutes of the film, which means that the only real emotional moments that land are given a shockingly short time to stick their landing, which they largely do but by the time you register that Fjallið (The Mountain) is finally reaching into the depths of the soul, where it should have been all along, the credits start running.
Fjallið (The Mountain) is a film that should have knocked it out of the park with fine actors, a highly relatable premise and a clearly empathetic understanding of what grief can do to a person or family, but somehow much of that promise and possibility is squandered by a story that tries so hard to be ruminative and nuanced that it succumbs to the well-worn tropes and cliches that litter its inert storyline, failing in the process to meaningfully and movingly rise above them.