As writer-director, Vladimir de Fontenay has taken the central novella Sukkwan Island from David Vann’s autobiographical short-fiction collection from 2009, detached it from the surrounding complex constellation of stories related to this main piece and presents it here as a standalone drama of father-son bonding.
The resulting film begins as something forthright and heartfelt; it looks as if it’s going to be a liberatingly scary wilderness adventure out there in the real world away from cellphones, social media etc. But with its strenuous yet subdued performances and weirdly cramped and gloomy narrative, it leads us finally into a blind alley: a twist-reveal which I found fundamentally unsatisfying.
Swann Arlaud (the lawyer from Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall) is Tom, a guy who is unhappily separated from Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton) due to his own now bitterly regretted infidelity. Above all, he misses their now teenage son Roy – played by Woody Norman, the tousle-haired kid from Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon from 2021.
He pleads with Elizabeth to let him take Roy away with him for a stay in a lakeside cabin he has rented on remote Sukkwan Island (in Alaska in the original, now in the Norwegian Fjords) – he promises a glorious time of hunting, fishing and emotional reconnection.
Taking pity on her ex-partner’s wretchedness and loneliness, Elizabeth agrees and so does Roy who is initially excited by this extraordinary prospect and by finally getting to know his smart, witty down-to-earth dad on this magically beautiful island. But then he is increasingly alarmed by his father’s mood swings and by how obviously unprepared he is to live in this very dangerous place. What have they got themselves into?
Well, the answer to that question appears to recede continually, just out of reach, as the story proceeds. Apparently catastrophic things happen: a bear attacks their cabin while they are out, gobbling their food and damaging their vital two-way radio. Tom grimly shows Roy the firearms he has brought with him, including a revolver – inevitably bringing to mind Chekhov’s time-honoured dictum about what happens to a gun produced in Act One. At one stage, Tom falls down a steep incline with weird suddenness and at another stage, Roy passes out, lost in the freezing snow. Yet there appears to be not much in the way of credible, physical consequence to any of this, despite Roy’s own increasingly miserable need to return home. And a character called Anna (Finnish star Alma Pöysti) from the mainland is continuously on call with her hydroplane to deliver supplies and help.
Cinematographer Amine Berrada certainly makes the film look lovely, and the performers themselves do their best, but the story feels numb and blank and the ending is unconvincing, raising questions which are not addressed by the final explanatory titles before the closing credits. A frustrating, dislocated experience.
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Sukkwan Island is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
English (US)