Winter Kills
Haut et Court – Maipo Film – Versus Production – Good Chaos – RTBF/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Sukkwan Island (2025)
A stark winter landscape in the Norwegian Fjords is the third key player in "Sukkwan Island," in which a father and son set out to spend an entire year together largely isolated from the world, at the father's instigation. It seems that Tom (Swann Arlaud) hopes to strengthen his relationship with teenager, Roy (Woody Norman), after some kind of messy divorce from Roy's mother, Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton, too briefly). But Tom is twitchy from the start. Psychological cracks are clearly going to split open out in the wilderness.
That set-up could be outlining a thriller; but as with the source material in David Vann's drawn-from-life 2008 book, this is a family drama about grief, estrangement, memory and loneliness. Mr. Vann's characters were in Alaska, with the film's transplant to Europe introducing some incidental cross-border dimensions via the casting: Roy and Elizabeth are very English while Tom is clearly French. The exact nature of estrangement between father and son isn't always clear; but the difference in nationality adds extra distance to the space between the pair, a gap widening as Tom's mental distress escalates. There's an introduction showing an older Roy (Ruaridh Mollica) recollecting events, dropping dark hints of past disaster on the island. For us and the younger man, it duly arrives.
The emotional core of all this is perfectly solid, screenwriter-director Vladimir de Fontenay knowing that universal tensions about parents and children, plus the helpless agonies of a loved one's mental collapse, need some delicate blending. Since this involves a father and male child, there's also a reading in here about fragile masculinity at both ends of the age range; but for that the film might have needed to dig deeper than it cares to. A frozen landscape, plus the prospect of attack from a passing and possibly symbolic brown bear, literalize the film's psychological terrain well enough without Mr. de Fontenay hammering too hard, even if the mechanics of a year's isolation are glossed over rapidly. Or rather, Tom has glossed over them. The film is a child's perspective of a father first becoming unreadable and then drifting out of reach altogether. If it doesn't show that process as heated and frenetic, it's not because it doesn't understand the temperature of the panic involved.
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