‘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, basically a father-son two-hander set towards 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 major attraction, as is the awful however breathtaking setting. Far much less convincing, nonetheless, 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 Cell Properties. Above all, Sukkwan Island ought to entice 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 screen Rising Stars Scotland alumnus Ruaridh Mollica) making an extended in a single day drive by way of 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 yr 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 an impressive 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 possibly solely be a matter of time earlier than one or each of those now not pleased campers begins to unravel. 

Issues get ever extra intense – if not at all times extra compelling – till occasions take a shock late flip that, along with the coda, viewers might discover implausible and unearned. The story – transplanted from its authentic Alaskan setting – relies on a piece 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 task combining physicality (chopping wooden, trekking by way of snow, taking icy swims) with a gamut of emotional registers, from insouciant pleasure by way of adolescent glumness to frazzled desperation. Much less convincing is Arlaud, a constantly fascinating 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 facets of the position.

There’s little again story initially, leaving us to marvel precisely who Tom is, why he has chosen to come back 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 laborious to purchase the psychological shifts

The movie’s emotional drive can be undermined by a generic rating of ambient electronica by Florent Chronie-De Maria and Jeremy Villecourt – and relatively lazy use of a Speaking Heads hit for a second of lakeside jubilation. However the movie is at all times 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: mild by way of falling snow or deep mist and, in a single beautiful shot, the shadows forged by a misery flare over a forest at evening.