Magic Mountains (2024) shows us a new way (or ways) for a movie to be bad. Beautifully filmed and edited, the picture is nothing if not stylish. It's fairly suspenseful with a damsel in distress plot. The characters are opaque and enigmatic with obscure motivations. The picture looks great and has obtuse dialogue that seems influenced by Harold Pinter, but, ultimately, the movie is vacuous, caught between genres (it's either an elliptical study in existential isolation and anguish or some sort of mountain-climbing thriller). The viewer is left with the strong sense of having been defrauded. The handsome appearance of the movie belies its plot defects, its unintentional absurdity and emptiness. Emptiness in a movie can be cipher for existential angst or it can merely simulate feelings that art-house audiences are used to experiencing, without really earning that effect.
Lars, a famous writer of bestselling novels, seems to be stalking his ex-girlfriend. Hannah. He meets her in a bar where she is inexplicably waiting alone. (The action seems to take place in Belgium). We have no idea why this beautiful woman is alone in an empty bar under the surveillance of the handsome, if creepy, Lars. She talks to Lars, a bad idea, and he announces that he has written the last of his bestselling "Emily novels", implying that Emily is a surrogate for Hannah who left him several years ago. In a rather sinister manner, Lars says he is going to "retire" Hannah and won't write about her anymore. But he wants closure and so he suggests a mountain-climbing excursion for the two of them. (He claims they were always happiest while climbing together; Hannah responds that they always quarreled climbing down from the summit and, so, Lars says he will hire a helicopter -- he's now fabulously wealthy -- to take them down from the peak.) Of course, Hannah, sensing malign motivations on Lars' part, turns down this ridiculous and overtly hostile invitation and the movie ends happily after about ten minutes. I'm just kidding. For inscrutable reasons, Hannah agrees to accompany her threatening ex-boyfriend on a trip to the mountains -- yes, just the two of them.
Hannah and Lars stay at a cabin high in the Tatra Mountains, a range of the West Carpathians on the border between Poland and Hungary. A Polish mountaineer, Voitek, lives in the cabin with his mother, a sweet grandmotherly figure who sings (untranslated) ballads to her son and the estranged couple. Voitek, a handsome soulful figures, has contempt for Lars and says he prefers Bulgakov to his guest's novels. (Later, in the movie, he uses one of Lars' books as kindling for a fire.) After some tense exchanges between the arrogant Lars and the equally arrogant Voitek, the three set off for the high Tatras. They camp out in the forest primeval after doing a test climb on a spire of rock to demonstrate that Hannah and Lars are sufficiently skilled for the trek to the summit on the next day. The men are obviously suspicious of one another and Hannah suspects Lars of treachery. So, of course, she refuses to climb with Lars the next day and the movie ends happily for her. I'm just kidding. Hannah continues the expedition with the increasingly deranged Lars and, indeed, consents to climb in the sheer, barren wilderness dependent on Lars for her safety. (Voitek who suspects Lars of bad intentions agrees to shadow Hannah at a discrete distance as they make the climb and gives her a whistle that she can use to summon him if the novelist goes off the deep end and tries to harm her.) There's a long spooky cave that leads through the bottom of talus field, emerging in a spectacular glacial cirque ringed by nasty-looking thousand foot cliffs. Hannah senses that Voitek isn't actually following her -- she blows her whistle in the cave but the guide doesn't appear. (It's implied that the soulful Voitek is in cahoots with Lars.) So, of course, she crawls back through the cave into the meadow and forests, hikes back down to Voitek's cabin where his mom greets her and all ends well. But, I'm just kidding -- even though Voitek now seems to be nowhere around, and even though Hannah has earlier fallen and been left to dangle off a cliff with no help from Lars, she decides "What the hell?" and continues her fatal climb with the completely psychotic and vengeful novelist. (People with experience in mountaineering tend to be literal-minded -- they deride the movie for its poorly imagined climbing sequences, the fact that no one is dressed for this Alpine endeavor, and that no one has bothered to bring a radio or GPS system with them on this ill-considered expedition; characters seem to be climbing in their tennis shoes.)
The climbing scenes are quite thrilling -- I don't know enough to critique technical details -- and the landscapes are forbidding and spectacular. The film's photographers have a real gift for natural details and some sequences with water flowing over boulders or shaggy, tortured trees have a wonderfully palpable immediacy. You can almost feel the cold and wet. But the movie is devoid of any common sense, ludicrous on its face, and, although fantastically stylish and elliptical in a tendentious way, there's no disguising the fact that the movie makes no sense. It's a micro-budget murder movie with art-house pretensions. The film's interest lies in its sophisticated surface, it's appearance, that almost deludes the viewer into thinking that they are seeing something not only beautiful, but profound.
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