The Father Who Moves Mountains

After reading a few reviews, seeing how divisive the father (admirably played by Mr. Titieni) is, I believe this movie perfectly underlines the greyness of life. On one hand you have an extremely powerful man going full Ahab in his quest to literally move the mountains (beautiful Romanian aphorism), alienating his family along the way, on the other hand you have the fearless leader capable of inspiring people and turning doubters into believers.

One of the best shot Romanian movies, one of the very few without sound issues, head and shoulders above the artsy fartsy empty works of some of the better known Romanian directors.

I wonder how it comes that the official intelligence service is involved in a private matter. It's a little embarrassment of Romanian democracy with the implication to corruption, isn't it?

Fatherhood? Sense of duty? Hubris? Selfishness? Stubborness? Stupidity? I despise most of the behaviours/feelings displayed by the main character but I'm not sure this is why I just disliked the movie.

Trying to dig a little deeper: what was the author's intention? It's not an action movie, not a good thriller, not even a decent drama. The director neither praises neither condemns what he shows, as if trying to be objective, yet it's not a documentary at all (even if it is a supposedly "true" story).

10 minutes total of scattered dialogues depict sufficiently all the relevant things the movie can offer: parenthood shortcomings, fears, and sense of guilt; getting old; the corruptive/corrupted nature of people. The rest is time annoyingly wasted: we are mostly offered nearly 2 hours of a desperate idiot with a certain power that other people second out of pity/duty/interest.

And BTW I wonder what kind of winter storms they had in that year to render mountains of 2000-2500m so impossibly dangerous...

This movie explores the characters - their motivations, flaws and faults, against the backstory of their children going missing in the mountains.

Loyalty, connections, stubbornness, grief, are all displayed.

You may not sympathize with the characters, but you can empathize with - what would you do?

... Said my 12 year old son when the movie ended. This movie is very well made, beautifully acted, cinematography amazing, but.... absolutely horrible story and main character. You just can't believe a human being can be this arrogant and selfish. I understand the ending, it just doesn't do justice to the movie nor does it respect the time the viewer invested in it. Warming: this movie is not about a heroic rescue mission, but about a horribly selfish man.

Update: I gave the movie 2 stars because of how annoying the ending is. But this doesn't do justice to the acting, production and deeper layers of this story. The fact I was disappointed in the ending and in the main character, does not justify giving this well made movie 2 stars. This was not a bad movie. It was just not what I was expecting or what I wanted to see.