Glen Gould and Justin Rain in North Mountain.MAZEKING PICTURES
- North Mountain
- Written by: Bretten Hannam
- Directed by: Bretten Hannam
- Starring: Justin Rain, Glen Gould, Meredith MacNeill
- Classification: 14A; 75 minutes
On a clear day, you can see Brokeback Mountain from North Mountain. Unfortunately, there’s nothing clear about North Mountain, an inexplicable would-be thriller involving a pair of Indigenous men who refuse to let bad guys, bullet wounds and burned-alive relatives get in the way of their unlikely intergenerational affair. The low-budget confuse-machine is directed by first-time filmmaker Bretten Hannam, a Nova Scotian of mixed Indigenous ancestry who did himself no favours by hiring himself as the screenwriter. Justin Rain stars as Wolf, a young hunter who falls head over bow-and-arrow for an on-the-lam ex-con with an interesting back story and a bag of money. Dialogue is sparse and unmemorable, violence is gory, ambiance is absent and the plot has holes big enough to drive a better movie through. In the end, one guy desperately pounds at the chest of another, hoping to revive the body. It’s a metaphor for North Mountain, a dead-on-arrival film that starts slow but goes south quickly.
Brad Wheeler