Andy is hired to assist Dr. Wallace Fiennes who strongly believes that any problems can be cured using lobotomy. An eerie anti-nostalgic drama about the “good old days.”
Following the death of his mother, Andy meets Dr. Wallace Fiennes who offers him a job: as a highly sought-after specialist who travels across the U.S., Dr. Wallace Fiennes needs an assistant to make a photographic record of the patients he operates on. Andy agrees to take the job hoping, among other reasons, to learn what happened to his mother who had also been a patient of Dr. Fiennes.
In this somber portrait of Eisenhower-era America, the protagonist of The Mountain has an historical prototype, Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman. Inventor of transorbital lobotomy, Freeman believed that it helped to make the most violent patients submissive and silent. His youngest patient was only four years old. The case of Freeman is horrifying in many ways, but director Rick Alverson does not use it to reveal the criminal delusions of the past. The Mountain is a pessimistic-to-the-core story of attempts to overcome disintegration and alienation, attempts that probably should not be stopped even in the face of imminent failure.
The Mountain
Director: Rick Alverson
USA, 2018. 106 min. 18+
.jpg)