The Mountain Review: A Cryptic Journey of Self-Reclamation in the French Alps

From the moment that Thomas Salvador’s The Mountain opens on robotic engineer Pierre (Salvador) standing in his modern Paris apartment sipping a morning espresso, we understand him to be a man unmoored. At work, as his attention trails off in the midst of a presentation, he seems every bit as lost as the stray deer that he later notices roaming the empty streets of a mountainside town. Throughout the film, Pierre will often stare off into the distance, as if looking for something—but good luck figuring out what that actually is.

The Mountain tracks Pierre’s day-to-day life of self-isolation with dry precision after he travels into the Alps for his work and decides to turn his back on his life in the city for good. But whatever motivation underpins his decision is as nebulous as the clouds over the mountains, as Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.

It isn’t until Pierre meets Léa (Louise Bourgoin), the head chef at an Alpine restaurant, that the film gives us anything in the way of emotional stakes. But Bourgoin and Salvador have no real chemistry, and it’s almost as if both actors sense that Léa’s function is to provide Pierre’s character arc with some kind of basic trajectory that extends beyond whatever draws him to the Alps. The Mountain’s aimlessness seems intended as an extension of Salvador’s understanding of Pierre as a flâneur, but however purposeful, it saps the film of any undercurrent of friction.

Given that the vast majority of The Mountain was shot in a patch of the French Alps whose beautiful wintry splendor is undeniable, you start to get the feeling that Salvador is cheating a bit. The filmmaker wants us to feel as Pierre feels: drawn in, yes, but also hypnotized by some kind of call to nature. In communicating Pierre’s meditative bliss, the film assumes that watching someone trudge across sweeps of snow is inherently cathartic.

When Pierre discovers hidden powers atop a glacier, Salvador surprises us with a bizarre and earnestly mesmeric turn toward science fiction. By then, though, we’ve already spent over an hour looking at his stony visage staring blankly into the distance, so you can be forgiven for thinking that this moment is only cathartic in the sense that it’s a release from so much tedium. Turns out, Pierre masters life off the grid, but the film feels stuck in the ice to the end.