The Mountain Between Us review: Can British actors Idris Elba and Kate Winslet overcome the threat of nature in this romantic drama?
The Mountain Between Us review by Paul Heath.
Two British screen legends, Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, come together for this drama about two strangers who come together in extreme circumstances in Dutch-Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s (Omar, The Idol) The Mountain Between Us.
The Mountain Between Us is adapted from the book of the same name by Charles Martin, and sees Elba’s surgeon Dr. Ben Bass, and Winslet’s photojournalist Alex Martin stranded in the middle of a snowstorm at Salt Lake City airport. Both are on tight schedules, Ben needing to get home to perform a life-saving operation on a waiting patient, and Alex for her own wedding. The two meet at said airport and come up with the idea of chartering a plane together, pilot Walter (Beau Bridges) tasked with getting them to their final destination safely. Of course, all doesn’t quite go to plan and the plane comes down in rough, icy terrain, Ben and Alex left alone with Walter’s unnamed dog.
Ben gets away with minor injuries, though Alex didn’t fare as well, the character having an apparent concussion, battered leg and cuts and bruises. The dog is fine. Luckily for Alex, Ben is a hot-shot doctor, and soon gets her comfortable, but that doesn’t help their situation – stuck in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from civilisation with limited supply of food and water.
The film follows their endeavours to reach help, and against all odds, to survive in some of the worst conditions on Earth.
For some reason, The Mountain Between Us screamed generic tosh as we queued to view it at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. While the film does tow the seen-it-all-before line in terms of some of its plot beats and action sequences, there’s a lot to feast upon with this easy-to-watch drama.
A lot of the watch-ability is down to its two leads. There’s tons of chemistry between Elba and Winslet, the former clinging to his British accent, while the latter is cast with an American tongue. The tension that builds between the two is plausible, and never sways into the realms of cliché despite there being many points throughout where the narrative may have been led up the wrong path, and most of all we, the viewer, will the pair on throughout, right until the final frames.
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Abu-Assad makes the most of his limited cast – ultimately just the headliners for the majority, and employs lots of style too. The plane crash at the beginning of the film sees a single shot employed, a device which includes tons of dialogue between the two leads and Bridges’ ill=fated pilot, as well as the devastating decent into the mountains below – it could not have been an easy task to pull off.
The sticking point, strangely, is the dog. Not only does the canine survive without a scratch, but he manages to make it through the film without seemingly eating or drinking a thing. There’s also the added element, the big question that hangs over the entire thing – if they are starving and living off scraps, why don’t they eat the dog? Well, because the dog always survives.
The Mountain Between Us could have easily swayed into a mediocre cinematic experience, but there truly is tons to get out of the movie – most of all its believable, likeable characters, the two great performances from the big names headline, and some inventive film-making from Abu-Assad.
Definitely worth seeking out.
The Mountain Between Us review by Paul Heath, October 2017.
The Mountain Between Us is released on October 6th, 2017.
