By BRUCE DENNILL
The Mountain Between Us / Directed by Hany Abu-Assad / 13S
Kill Switch / Directed by Tim Smit / 13LV
Certain Women / Directed by Kelly Reichardt / 13L
Kirk Cameron: Connect / Directed by Caleb Price / PG
Inside / Directed by Miguel Angel Vivas / 18HV
Edge Of Winter / Directed by Rob Connolly / 13LV
Two great actors – Kate Winslet and Idris Elba – are isolated in the middle of a wasteland and in the middle of a slightly mushy script in The Mountain Between Us. As two travellers desperate to get home in a situation when flights are being cancelled all over the place, they take a risk that doesn’t pay off, ending up on a remote mountaintop in a frozen wasteland, facing all the challenges that come with that scenario. Their efforts to survive provide what thrills there are, but this is not so much a “triumph of the human spirit”-type inspiration piece as it is an attempt at an unconventional romance – which doesn’t quite work. Elba’s big-hearted doctor character is lovely, but so devoted to doing the right thing even when the odds are stacked against him that he feels unbelievable. And Winslet’s consummate skills mean her character’s more annoying characteristics stand out clearly, making her fairly unlikeable, and making it even more improbable that she and the man she’s connected to by circumstance would form as strong a bond as the story suggests. This is good, glossy stuff, but a long way off its full potential.
Kill Switch is essentially a video game with an iffy premise that has been made into a film that stretches believability – or indeed a desire to care at all about anyone involved – even further. Dan Stevens (best known for his work in Downton Abbey) is a spectacularly disinterested hero, a scientist who’s also a pilot – those are the best kind, right? – hired by a big evil corporation to manage the fallout (sort of literally) from some dubious activities they’d been involved in. It’s something about parallel universes and alternative energy sources for the Earth, and people fighting about where that energy ends up, but honestly, it’s such a tedious journey to get anywhere with this film that you kind of hope that the energy source to your TV will fail and save you having to keep watching.
Watching Certain Women is like reading a collection of short stories – stories with sophisticated literary qualifications; not the sharp, funny kind. As such, it requires a little concentration, and rewards that effort in gentle, unexpected ways. It follows the fortunes, as the title suggests, of a number of women whose lives vaguely – except in one case – overlap each other’s. It’s a study in the complexities of relationships, almost none of them very satisfying, but all of them either necessary or at least understandable in terms of the context in which the characters exist. They’re all residents of small towns in Montana, where opportunities are hard to come by and settling for what’s available is, if not expected, then not unusual. The acting is uniformly excellent from the protagonists – par for the course from Laura Dern and Michelle Williams, but unexpectedly deep and layered from Kristen Stewart and warm and profound from the relatively unknown Lily Gladstone. Quiet, reflective and gently moving, this is powerful filmmaking that never blows its own trumpet.
Connect is a well-intentioned, if not particularly profound, documentary about the challenges inherent in parenting children through the use of smart phones and all the potential pitfalls that this technology allows youngsters access to. Kirk Cameron, a likeable screen presence and – more importantly in this context, a father of six – is the face and producer of the project, and drafts a number of experts to elaborate on various aspects of the topic, as well as a number of parents who share the issues they’ve had with their own kids. There’s nothing revelatory here – all of it has been covered a number of times on any number of platforms – but the strength of this particular presentation is that it’s pitched well as family viewing, being easy to understand but not overly simplistic, and a good conversation starter on an important subject.
A compact, taut thriller, Inside is essentially a duel between two women – Sarah (Rachel Nichols) and an unnamed intruder (Laura Harring) – who both want the same thing: the unborn child in Sarah’s belly. Sarah wants it because it’s her child and a reminder of her late husband. The reason her persecutor is involved is unclear until the end of the film, and it’s a decent twist; one that makes sense (mostly) of all that has come before. In terms of an overall arc, the plot works well. But there are a number of incidents that aren’t really necessary in terms of developing the tension – the body count, for instance, is about twice as high as it needs to be – and what is a fairly brief production at 85 minutes feels padded. Still, there are sufficient frights and edginess along the way to make Inside worth watching.
The setting here – the frozen Canadian wilderness – is as important a character in Edge Of Winter as the actors. It’s a family drama that becomes a survival thriller as events unfold, with two boys, played by Tom Holland and Percy Hynes-White, going for a short trip with their father (Joel Kinnaman), now divorced from their mother, unemployed and generally unhappy with his lot. This is an awkward enough scenario – the elder man trying to prove himself; the youngsters either wanting to be anywhere else or hoping that old bonds can be renewed – but when circumstances conspire to leave the trio stranded, the relationships are both stretched to breaking point and strengthened through stress. Kinnaman does well as a man on the edge, wanting to do the right thing and desperate for stability and happiness, but ill-equipped to make real progress. The script throws in other minor facets to spice things up further, but what makes the piece work is the matching of love and anguish with the desolation of the characters’ surroundings.
