À en soulever des montagnes

... 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.

A new Romanian drama on Netflix. A wealthy father struggled against nature as he would not stop at anything to rescue his son, who was lost in the snowy mountain.

The synopsis really sounded like this movie would be an intense thriller. Instead, this was a deep and bleak character study of a father who tried everything to save his son. Going through Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that many did not like this movie, and I believed that they did not understand the message.

The father character is not a nice person. He's an affluent man who tried to use all his wealth and connections while manipulating and coercing others to help him. For him, others' safety did not matter too much to him. This did not make the father a likable character in audiences' eyes. However, I still found this movie to be powerful despite its depressing color because it showed the resilience and obsession of a parent, regardless of how good of a person the parent is. It should not be surprising that even some of the most evil persons would do anything to keep their loved ones safe. The father character was selfish and a bully, but being on his shoe, I doubt that many parents would do any different.

As I said before, this is not some thriller or tear-jerking drama. It's very slow, and the ending would leave many unsatisfied and even annoyed. However, for me, this ending effectively emphasized the theme of how parents would never give up on their children. Even more powerful was the fact that the movie was based on a true story.

Overall, a unique drama about the power of parental love. 8.5/10.

I'm not sure whether the reviews on this page are written by frustrated Romanians or if they're written by foreigners. Either way, it's hard to understand the abysmal ratings, this was a very well-made movie inspired by true events (if you live in Romania you should know about it, it was quite a while ago), great acting (Adrian Titieni is a wonderful actor who's been in numerous great movies), and awesome cinematography. It's one of the few Romanian films that feel like they were produced somewhere else. How can you be annoyed at the ending, when it's a real-life ending, I just don't get it. But hey I guess Marvel movies are more entertaining, you don't have to really use your brain at all. Stick to those movies next time instead of trying to ruin this movie with unwarranted bad reviews.

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.

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...