Małgorzata Szumowska’s Infinite Storm is quite the about-face after the director’s ambitious Never Gonna Snow Again. Where that film has an expansive cast of characters and an allegorical narrative, Infinite Storm tells a minimalist, primal story—specifically one that’s by and large intensely focused on two individuals surviving against the forces of nature. But compared to the multilayered complexity of Never Gonna Snow Again, Infinite Storm feels as if it’s afflicted by a frustrating narrow-mindedness.
The story centers on the real-life Pam Bales (Naomi Watts), a search and rescue volunteer who faced daunting odds in trying to save herself and a fellow hiker (Billy Howle) she found stranded on New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, near death from exposure and hypothermia. Throughout, the filmmakers are almost stubbornly fixated on capturing the intensity of the characters’ race against the elements as they descend the mountain, often resulting in overly protracted scenes of them simply trudging through snow and wilderness. And as snow swirls and clouds the frame, the experience of watching the film can be as literally blinding for the audience as the weather is for Pam and the man whom she called John.
Much of Infinite Storm plays out as a one-woman show for Watts, who, as is her wont, powerfully channels seemingly every facet of the emotional spectrum, especially during the rare scenes that offer a reprieve from the monotonous depiction of Pam and John’s ordeal. After Pam is stuck in an especially perilous situation, we get flashbacks that briefly cover her past life with her since-deceased children. For Pam, recalling this time with her children gives her the courage to forge ahead, and these scenes suggest that her search-and-rescue missions have always constituted a coping mechanism—acts of defiance against grief.
While the film at least opens some kind of window into Pam’s past, it frustratingly keeps John and his life at arm’s length. John is coping with a loss that partially explains his stubborn behavior throughout his ordeal on the mountain, but Josh Rollins’s screenplay so conspicuously skimps on the details that the man becomes little more than a cipher.
This dearth of backstory and superficial sense of character come to haunt Infinite Storm in its final stretches, when Pam and John reunite at a café not long after surviving their ordeal. Though the characters are bonded by trauma, the denouement doesn’t hit the emotionally cathartic heights that the filmmakers are clearly aiming for. As Pam and John trade generic platitudes about their lives and moving on from grief, the film reveals that it not only lacks for a complete vision, but that it’s all too comfortable in settling for mawkishness.
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Harsh review, especially coming from a person trying to use fancy words in statements that just don’t make much sense.
I enjoyed the movie. Thank you Mrs. Watts.
You, Wess, seem narrow minded.
Maybe if you spent time outdoors and have been in a dangerous situation, you would have more respect for the film.
I actually felt that the director might have been trying to convey this sense of distance between the two of them. I did find his motivations a mystery, and I suspect Pam would have as well until she came to understand what was happening for him.