‘Sukkwan Island’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr. Vladimir de Fontenay. France/Norway/Belgium/UK. 2025. 114mins

Frontier-style masculinity is in disaster, and present process a extreme case of the shivers, in Sukkwan Island, primarily a father-son two-hander set in opposition to the rigours of a Norwegian winter. The duo’s interaction in a snowbound survival drama – which one suspects was not that a lot cosier an expertise for the actors than the characters – is a main attraction, as is the grim however breathtaking setting. Far much less convincing, nevertheless, are the narrative and its psychological intricacies.

 At all times watchable for Amine Berrada’s cinematography

Premiering in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competitors – and to be launched in France by Haut et Court docket and the UK by Curzon – that is the second function from French writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay, following 2017’s Canada-set Cellular Properties. Above all, Sukkwan Island ought to appeal to consideration for its two rising stars of various ages. They’re British mid-teen Woody Norman, who made a splash aged 11 in Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, and Swann Arlaud, a compelling stalwart of French cinema, who attracted worldwide consideration in Justine Triet’s Cannes- and Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall. 

The movie begins with a younger man, Roy (Display Rising Stars Scotland alumnus Ruaridh Mollica) making a protracted in a single day drive by a Northern winter panorama, then assembly up with helicopter pilot Anna (Finnish actor Alma Pöysti, from Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves). She flies him to the distant, uninhabited Sukkwan island, the place a ramshackle cabin was the location of life-changing occasions years earlier. Flash again to Roy (performed by Norman) as a youngster within the UK, residing together with his mom Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton). Roy’s estranged father Tom (Arlaud) makes a shocking proposition: that the lad ought to take a 12 months off faculty and be part of him on the island, to tough it amid the weather and do some overdue bonding. 

Sukkwan is certainly idyllic when the duo arrive; in any case, what’s a draughty previous cabin when there are fish to be caught and a powerful autumn panorama to take pleasure in? However their dilapidated house is wrecked, apparently by a bear, leaving them with out radio communication. Then a harsh winter units in – and it may well solely be a matter of time earlier than one or each of those now not completely satisfied campers begins to unravel. 

Issues get ever extra intense – if not all the time extra compelling – till occasions take a shock late flip that, along with the coda, viewers could discover implausible and unearned. The story – transplanted from its authentic Alaskan setting – is predicated on a bit of David Vann’s autobiographically-inspired 2009 novel-slash-collection ’Legend Of A Suicide’. Accordingly Sukkwan Island has a sure self-reflexive dimension inbuilt, however not essentially to its profit.

Norman is spectacular in a job combining physicality (chopping wooden, trekking by snow, taking icy swims) with a gamut of emotional registers, from insouciant pleasure by adolescent glumness to frazzled desperation. Much less convincing is Arlaud, a persistently attention-grabbing actor, however who suffers right here in a largely English-speaking position (Tom, just like the actor, is evidently French), with the character coming throughout as extra enigmatically unusual than maybe is required by the extra strictly existential points of the position.

There may be little again story firstly, leaving us to marvel precisely who Tom is, why he has chosen to return to Sukkwan, and certainly how Arlaud’s otherworldly qualities – his sly facial expressions and elfin options, battered as they’re right here – fairly outline this character. The story and the psychological coherence would appear to depend on Tom successfully being that perennial archetype, the common Joe out of his depth, whereas the casting of Arlaud primes us to see Tom extra as a type of failed artist-visionary. As Tom will get ever extra erratic and weatherbeaten, Arlaud holds our consideration, but it surely turns into more and more arduous to purchase the psychological shifts

The movie’s emotional drive can also be undermined by a generic rating of ambient electronica by Florent Chronie-De Maria and Jeremy Villecourt – and fairly lazy use of a Speaking Heads hit for a second of lakeside jubilation. However the movie is all the time watchable for Amine Berrada’s cinematography. He distinguished himself with 2023’s Senegalese drama Banel & Adama, and right here finds richly atmospheric magic within the Northern shifts of local weather: gentle by falling snow or deep mist and, in a single attractive shot, the shadows solid by a misery flare over a forest at night time.