User reviews

(i'm going to structure this review so that you have the same feeling that I did while watching this movie)



The mountain is great at

times?

(inconsistent inconsistent)

It struggles to maintain a consistent theme, often

rambling rambling thematically?

I understand the value of "show don't tell" don't get me wrong?

(Depressing psyclops)

But, there is a science to the abstract.

(Kauf Kauf)

Charlie Kaufman's work is a great example. (Eternal Sunshine, Adaptation, Being John Malcovitch) He gets pretty WEIRD and abstract, sure. But

(HELP HELP I'M FALLING?)

He makes sure to lay down a simple groundwork first, so the viewer doesn't get too lost in his interpretation interpretation.

THE MOUNTAIN DOESN'T HAVE ANY GROUNDWORK, UNFORTUNATELY. NOTHING IS SET IN STONE. THERe isn't one set theme that you can latch on to. Because of this, the whole film feels wrong

WRONG WRONG KRONK

It's hard to tell what was an intentional choice from the director, and what was just an inconsistent detail.

It's a shame, because the movie was great at times. And I did understand some of

END OF REVIEW

Greetings again from the darkness. It's happened before and it'll likely happen a few more times. A movie ends and I'm at a loss as to how to explain it. What should I tell potential viewers? Is it even possible to "spoil" a movie that is so purposefully downbeat - one that relishes its inability to be analyzed by conventional methods? Filmmaker Rick Alverson has previously knocked us off-kilter with THE COMEDY (2012) and ENTERTAINMENT (2015), and this time seems intent on ensuring our misery.

Tye Sheridan (MUD, 2012) stars as Andy, a functionally catatonic, sexually-confused Zamboni driver at the local ice rink where his dad Frederick (a quite grumpy Udo Kier) trains figure skaters. When dad drops dead on the ice, an aimless Andy is taken under the wing of an enigmatic Dr. Wallace "Wally" Fiennes (a toned-down Jeff Goldblum). Wally previously treated Andy's mother, which isn't really a good thing since he specializes in lobotomies and electric shock therapy. Andy hits the road with the doctor, carrying his equipment and taking before and after photos with the Polaroid Land Camera. Oh yeah, the setting is 1950's Pacific Northwest.

Goldblum's character is based on a real life doctor, and he runs up against an industry that is transitioning to drug treatments, leaving Wally searching for patients. He clearly believes in his treatments, and that leads to Jack, an eccentric whose daughter Susan (Hannah Gross, "Mindhunter") is in need of Wally's treatment. Jack is played by French acting veteran Denis Lavant, and his tirades and wild speeches blend French and English to the point that we lose the point - if there ever was one.

Goldblum's doctor enjoys a drink and the company of women while on the road, and Sheridan's Andy is so ultra-quiet he often becomes nearly invisible in social settings. If there is a narrative foundation to the film, I do wish Andy's Ouija board device had spelled it out for me. Instead, the haunting music contrasted with the use of "Home on the Range" left me understanding that the few words spoken carry little meaning, and we are meant to be disrupted by feelings. My hopeless feeling mostly left me asking "why?", and a bizarre post film Q&A with co-writer Dustin Guy Defa added little context. Actually, that was likely the perfect ending to this film.

Fair enough that this film is a vehicle for Jeff Goldblum, and a character loosely based on the infamous neurosurgeon who invented the transorbital lobotomy ought to give him plenty to work with. In those days, there were no meds yet, to control patient behavior, and lobotomies were a response to that urgent need. The real-life Dr. Freeman was obsessed with the need for social conformity, and thought that his compliant, lobotomized patients were an improvement on disorderly nature. So, how could Goldblum turn him into someone so bland? His Dr. Fiennes has no insight into his own status as monster. He seems to be a latter-day Don Quixote, meaning well, riding the roads with his '52 Plymouth (instead of a horse named Rocinante) with his faithful Polaroid-Land-Camera carrying sidekick, Andy (instead of Sancho) by his side. Maybe its a statement about the banality of evil. It does not work for me.

This film tells the story of a young man who gets a job as the assistant for a psychiatrist.

The film is very very slow, but that does not bother me. Just a few minutes in, I can tell the director and cinematographer work very hard to make each scene aesthetically beautiful. However, there is very little plot. As the film progresses, I get increasingly lost. The last fifteen minutes is inexplicable, and the five minute monologue in French (which is not subtitled) confuses me even further. Another point which I dislike is Tye Sheridan's constant same expressionless expression. I see why he acts this way, but almost all the psychiatric patients are more interesting than this protagonist. Overall, I find this film too artistic, inaccessible and very dull.

At the end of this movie you will feel just just like its ending - cold and unfeeling.

If you want to know what life looks like through a lobotomized person - watch this movie!

That's my best I can write about The Mountain.

Don't waste your time, unless you enjoy watching paint dry or grass grow.

Art should make you uncomfortable and make you think and that's what this film does. This movie is like an art installation that you don't want to watch but feel like you should. It's unsettling, slow, stark and sad but memorable. Not a light or easy watch. You've been warned.

I am very familiar with the history of lobotomies. I was one of the producers of an hour long radio documentary on the subject for National Public Radio and my own uncle had a lobotomy.

Unfortunately, this film is an abuse of the suffering and misery of people who have mental illness and people who have been traumatized by family members with these problems.

The creators of this film perhaps thought they were making something beautiful out of that suffering but my experience of it was that the artistic aspects of the film failed to overcome the horrible sadness and despair of everyone in the film. Pretty images cannot redeem the overwhelmingly horrible content.

The only people who might enjoy this film are either very sick people or people who have been lucky enough to never know any such suffering and have a detached curiosity or people who are using drugs to alter the state of their consciousness.

The director must've watched The Master too many times.

The 4:3 Bergman-esque photography is fantastic, but this movie is quite slow and a little too on the nose.

6/10

It seemed like this movie was all the celluloid that was on the cutting room floor, neatly assembled because it would have been a waste to simply throw them away.

The photography is delicate and exquisite, and Jeff Goldblum is as magnetic and as quirky as always. But it's not enough, not nearly enough, to carry the movie.

Midway through this film, a woman explains to the main character, Andy (Tye Sheridan), that her daughter is at a state hospital. "She gets it from her father," the mother explains, before clarifying, "I have it, too, but I know how to exist in the world with it."

Like many things in this film, the pronoun "it" has no definite antecedent. "Insanity" as an outright word is studiously avoided throughout the film, just like "pregnancy" was once unspeakable on American television. One could safely assume that the woman is referring to "mental illness," but this is the 1950s, and what would qualify as mental illness is even vaguer than it is today. In the twenty-first century, there is still debate over the exact meaning of a "schizophrenia" diagnosis. Talk about "hearing voices" suggests that this might be a movie about schizophrenia--perhaps the apotheosis of mental illnesses in our culture.

Yet, in the 1950s, having sexual attraction to people of the same sex would have also justified institutionalization, electroshock therapy, and a possible lobotomy. For large stretches of this film, the "itness" of its meaning seems to have something to do with sexuality and/or gender, but even that is nebulous. When Andy explain to his father (Udo Kier) that he had a dream in which a man and a woman were fighting with each other in such a tangle that he couldn't tell them apart, the father angrily snaps, "When you were a child, I thought you would never stop growing. Now look at you. Just like your mother" before abruptly leaving. Is that a jab at Andy's masculinity? His naive sexuality? His possible queerness? Is that what this film is about?

My grandmother resided at a state hospital for a while in 1957-8 and received several rounds of shock therapy. What was wrong with her? Today we would call it postpartum depression. My mother had just been born. My grandmother's previous child had died tragically in infancy. Jolting her brain was a perceived solution to my grandmother's ambivalent feelings about bringing another life into the world. The first several minutes of this movie--and perhaps all of it--seem to be about the listlessness, isolation, and untraceable oppressiveness of depression.

Then again, the "it" could be something as mundane as alcohol abuse. The mother is intoxicated as she says this line, and her heavy drinking is the only thing we see that seems to constitute any kind of "abnormality." There are certainly plenty of scenes of characters drinking to excess in this film--including so-called "healthy" characters. But is drinking a symptom or a solution? Or is it simply something normal? "Alcohol Use Disorder" did not become a psychiatric diagnosis until 1994.

There's even a suggestion that the "it" could be something like an irrepressible desire to create art. The filmmakers are certainly aware of the long-standing romantic trope that associates artistic expression with suffering and insanity, and a character played by Denis Levant straddles that line beautifully.

And then there's the possibility that the "it" is merely an unwillingness to exist within society's norms. Early in the film, the traveling lobotomist Dr. Wally Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) dictates to Andy that "sometimes the best solution for the family is to render the patient innocuous." He pauses to spell out this bit of doublespeak for his young secretary--I-N-N-O-C-U-O-U-S--assuming that this euphemistic medicalese will be unknown to him. We must make them harmless and controllable, Fiennes explains. That is, essentially, the only justification he gives for his brutal profession in the entire film. Otherwise, he seems to have no more opinion or philosophy about what he does than Andy had about being a Zamboni driver at an ice skating rink.

All we know about the institutionalized daughter is that she kisses a man she should probably not be kissing, yet she only does so as a last resort at maintaining her autonomy. Is her willingness to deploy her sexuality in order to protect herself evidence that she needs to be made "innocuous" in order to exist in the stifling world of 1950s America?

Ultimately, I think this film wants us to consider to what extent we are all "insane." I would say there's only a fine line between how the "sane" and the "insane" characters are depicted in this film, but in fact I think there's no line at all. A "twist" in the third act, in which a presumably sane character is suddenly revealed to be insane, solidifies that fact.

There's a lot of nonsense and ambiguity in this film. At one point Andy ponders the slip of paper in his fortune cookie. Dr. Fiennes eagerly asks him, twice, "What does it say?" The film cuts away before we learn what it says, and it's never mentioned again. Perhaps it says nothing. Even though Dr. Fiennes's own fortune was utter garbage--"You will one day see the Great Pyramids of Egypt"--as viewers we're conditioned to believe that something featured in a film will be meaningful. If Andy had had the same fortune about the pyramids, then perhaps we would assume that meant their destinies were intertwined (there are no coincidences, after all, Freud supposedly believed). If he had no fortune at all, perhaps we'd consider that ominous. Symbolism in art is often overdetermined.

But I think it's wrong to try to overanalyze this film, and I think that message is--somewhat paradoxically--the point of this movie. Some films beg to have every shot and symbol deciphered and interpreted, but I think THE MOUNTAIN--the very title of which refers to an intriguing yet nonsensical diatribe about the interpretation of art--wants us to still that impulse. Overanalyzing a movie is one thing, but the same impulse also drives us to overanalyze people, to interpret everything they say and do within narrowly confined concepts, and once we've learned how to read them, we can then diagnose them, box them, confine them, and render them innocuous.

After that twist I mentioned happens, a disturbing catechism occurs in which moments and images of the film that were previously ambiguous and evocative are reduced to the simple binary of yes/no questions, which are together piled up into an inventory of evidence of insanity. We know this is as unscientific and wrong as a Buzzfeed "Which Disney villain are you?" quiz. We know that these simple questions are pointing towards things that are far more intricate and complicated. Yet the very tangible result of this psychoanalytic oversimplification is something that is clean-cut and devastating.

THE MOUNTAIN is a gorgeous film. The cinematography is stifling, with a monochromatic beige color palette and a confining box frame aspect ratio. This is a road trip movie, essentially, and Andy and Dr. Fiennes are traveling from one hospital to another, but they may as well have shot all the scenes at the same location. Every hospital room is identically barren. All the patients--though their ages, genders, and races may fluctuate--wear the same brown socks and anesthetized facial expressions. Tye Sheridan, who I don't normally consider an exceptionally good actor, does an excellent job here. With limited lines, he embodies the physicality of a depressed and confused young man of the 1950s. Similar to Joaquin Phoenix's performance in THE MASTER, Sheridan seems to be inhabiting the physical bearing of a previous generation's ideas about masculinity. He evokes layers and is fascinating to watch, as are all the actors in this film.

THE MOUNTAIN is certainly not a pleasant film, a riveting one, or even one that I can easily recommend, but I do think it merits much more than the dismissiveness with which many viewers seem to be regarding it.

At the risk of being biased, I sometimes look at a person's face or photo and receive information that draws me to or away from him/her. The eyes are the window of your truth. If the perception was valid, I do not discard the possibility of bias, but I attend to that first impression. I say this, because something seemed neither conclusive nor enlightened in the movie «The Mountain», but a too affected attempt to propose alternative ways to knowledge, that ends up becoming hermetic.

Contrary to what I had read, «The Mountain» is not the story of the lobotomy specialist Walter Freeman, named here Dr. Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum), and the lobotomy is not a metaphor of cinema-going. It is the story of Andy (Ty Sheridan), the young man who accompanies Freeman in what is perhaps one of his last tours, depriving various human beings of light and autonomy, through that inhuman process of treating mental illness. Andy's mother was lobotomized by Fiennes, and his father (Kier), who has closed communication with the boy, dies after a few minutes of projection, taking with him possible answers to Andy's doubts and a dream that becomes the (secret) key to the film. Without parents or certainties, Andy goes with Fiennes to psychiatric hospitals, where he observes, takes photos and remains silent, still with no answers, uneasy about his feelings.

The first two acts of «The Mountain» are, in fact, enigmatic and, therefore, they keep us attentive: Andy is at the center of the story, he discovers the use of the ouija board and has visions of the disturbing figure of a hermaphrodite (who can be his mother), whom he invokes with the ouija board. All this points to his naiveté and virginity, on the one hand, but, on the other, to his initiation into the principles of the occult and to scientific notions about the duality of existence, which director Rick Alverson conducts with the strategy of "now you see it, now you don't ", as the holder of a "hidden science" that a filmmaker is, and leaves the audiences in limbo (or believing that they are watching the story of a bad doctor who lobotomizes anyone in sight) and enjoys breaking their dramatic expectation that everything must be answered, as he has said in interviews.

And that was when I saw his photo. Alverson's photo. And I didn't trust anything anymore. I saw wisdom in his eyes, but, at the same time, I saw the ego of the one who does not fully understand his gift of handling film to transcends himself and open doors. Instead, he introduces us in the third act to Denis Lavant, in another role as ugly madman, this time as a precursor of the "New Age" litanies, who does not speak but shouts in French and English, giving out information about the dual divinity that illustrates the hermaphrodite, a divine duality of which the human being is a reflection, with its values of positive-negative, day-night, male-female, contained in a single package, in our body from the embryonic stage. This and more could have been elaborated in a more artistic and less irksome way (Lavant has an annoying tendency towards over-acting) or perhaps, amusingly, like one of those old educational shorts about sex (and even mysticism) of the 1950s

I know what Alverson is talking about, I also have had readings that disturbed me at one time and ended up giving me peace, revealing to me the lies of so many religions and so many inveterate "illuminati", who hide information to control their followers, even if any virus can swallow them tomorrow. It would so easy be to tell them that the pristine trinity is the one that recognizes a god father and a god mother and a god son, which would (perhaps) put an end to so much misanthropy and misogyny, so many crimes.

I'm not going to ruin the film for you. Watch it if you want, but something must be clear: it is not the history of one doctor. It is the story of a boy and the enigma that he has to solve or not. Of course, the film has its tone, style and intention; it has that mannered (de)coloration where everything is brown and ocher, depriving life and nature of their colors, to give them a "special" look. It seemed to me a tricky game... even if it sounds biased.

This movie visually looks great and I quite liked the miserable mood but as the story trucked on, as I got to the/on with the plot, that's when the ice-picks went behind my eyes and scrambled my brain.

Maybe that was the point..

Visually interesting vintage cinematography. I only watched because I really like Jeff Goldblum. Where was the dialogue? I feel as though I got a Lobotomy after seeing The Mountain. Very dull and weird.

Slow, awkward, obtuse and weird. Not sure why actors of the caliber of Jeff Goldblum and Tye Sheridan agreed to such a bizarre script.

Poor Tye Sheridan. The kid is appearing in such weak films since he became an adult. As a juvenile, he showed such promise with "The Tree of Life," "Mud," and "Joe." Since then, he's chosen haughty, boring, moody, artsy crap like "Entertainment" and "The Mountain." I'm not saying Sheridan needs to be a movie star for the popcorn-munching idiots, but it would be nice to see him featured in a film where he could again show his acting talent. It would be a shame if he were to end up like Emile Hirsch, for instance. (Oh, "The Mountain" was the epitome of a borefest!)

Be careful if you're going to watch this movie, every review here, good or bad, is right to some extent. It is certainly a demanding movie, so don't watch it if you're tired. And, when you do watch it, do it carefully, let yourself feel everything, even boredom, and at the same time, analyse everything in the movie.

I know it's not saying a lot, but I write this because I almost didn't go see it because of the bad reviews (vierwers and critics alike) and I'm so happy I listened to my instinct and not the ratings. So, I hope this can convince someone who is in doubt, that this movie is worth it, even if it takes work to get through it.

This film (aside from the incredible lighting, framing of scenes, art direction & basically every other technical & creative aspect), TOTALLY SUCKS!!!..

DO YOURSELF A HUGE FAVOR.. AND AVOID ANYTHING TO DO WITH THUS COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME.. OTHERWISE, YOU'LL FIND YOURSELF (not only wanting to punch every actor in this thing), but YOU'LL ACTUALLY 'WANT / NEED A LOBOTOMY YOURSELF'.. Crossing all genres, regardless of budget (or lack of).. Truly, this is the absolute WORST FILM I'VE EVER, EVER, EVER SEEN.. I REALLY MEAN 'EVER'..

This was a bad movie and I should not have even finished it.

Not a fan of over-planned cinematography - because , as etheral as it can be, we all know as humans that this level of dirty perfection can hinder the ability to suspend belief. Even Tarkovsky got that wrong sometimes. When it does suspend ( by making the hospital scenes impressions, or dark cartoon sketches) I was willing to be led. As a study in stultifying American ignorance of War-damaged victims etc it was worth doing. But, the real problem here is Goldblum, who is loved by many and hated by most, imho. He is an apalling ham, but is intelligent enough to do an impression of a real performance. We get the normal, haltering, stuttering Goldblum poses and delivery - but his waferthin emotional depth, as an artist, is really insulting to any audience. As expected, he tanked this film, when it was already on shaky ground to begin with. Shame

This feels like every Vincent Gallo movie that's ever been made