97 min | R | March 25, 2022 | Bleecker Street
A nurse climbs Mount Washington alone and finds a stranger half-frozen and barely alive on the descent. She abandons her own hike to drag him down through a whiteout. The mountain is the easy part.
Pam Bales hikes Mount Washington by herself in October. The weather turns. On her way down she finds a young man sitting in the snow, underdressed and near death, with no gear and no plan. The rest of the film is a two-person survival ordeal in a whiteout, and underneath that ordeal sits a story about a woman who is rescuing this stranger because she cannot rescue the people she has already lost. Joshua Rollins builds the film around grief disguised as a mountain.
Naomi Watts plays Pam almost without dialogue. She narrates her competence through action. She checks her layers, rations her energy, and talks to the half-conscious man in the flat reassuring voice nurses use on patients who might not make it. Watts physicalizes exhaustion in a way that reads as real labor rather than performance. Billy Howle plays John as dead weight and mute despair, and the script gives him so little that Watts ends up carrying him in the literal sense and the dramatic sense.
Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert direct and shoot the film themselves, and the cinematography is the strongest element. They keep the camera close on Watts and let the white sky swallow the frame so the mountain becomes an absence rather than a vista. The wind dominates the sound design, and the score stays out of the way until a late flashback sequence overplays its hand and explains what the images already conveyed. Rollins structures the back half around a revelation that recontextualizes the rescue. The structure announces its own cleverness instead of trusting the survival footage to land the emotion.
The film works as a procedural about a competent woman keeping a dying man alive and stops working when it tries to be about more than that. Szumowska and Englert have a body in the snow and an actor willing to suffer for the camera, and that is enough for long stretches. The framing story arrives late and adds a layer the rest of the movie cannot support. What remains is a survival film with a remarkable lead trapped inside a screenplay that does not deserve her.