Aloft

In the opening scenes of the brooding titled ¨Aloft¨ or ¨No Llores Vuela¨ , a young boy carrying a falcon rushes along with his mom (Jennifer Connelly) across a bleak , frozen stretch of road in the Arctic , on their way to see a mysterious faith healer . She is Nana , a single , working-class mother desperately seeking a solution for her youngest child Gully (Winta McGrath) , who suffers from a brain tumor , while also dealing with her precocious , restless older son Ivan (Zen McGrath). Nana lives in northern Manitoba , working part-time on a farm , where she is having an affair with her married boss and attempting to raise her two young sons . In a last-ditch effort to save him from his terminal illness she drags her kids to that aforementioned faith healer (William Shimell) . Later on , us we follow a mother and her grown-up son (Cillian Murphy) . Nana has a great strength , almost stoicism, and she will become a renowned artist as well as healer , and he will grow into his own as an expert falconer married to an attractive woman (Oona Chaplin) . In the present , that puts the very meaning of life and art into question , so that we may contemplate the possibility of living life to its fullest , despite the uncertainties littering our paths . Tracking a journey by a documentarian , Jannia (Mélanie Laurent ), and her subject (Cillian Murphy) toward the North Pole . As journalist Jannia and accomplished falconer Ivan brave punishing winds and frozen but crackling lakes to visit his strange mother . There takes place an encounter between the two that will bring the very meaning of their lives into question .

This Faith-Healing drama is moody , downbeat , slowly paced , somber , dark and attempts to comment on humanity , or the lack of such in the world . ¨Aloft¨ is as remote as its Arctic setting , as the story is certainly rare but with great actors though protagonists leave us cold . Like cheeks on a freezing day , any curiosity or interest the sparse script engenders is puckered dry by the end , leaving behind only an irritating numbness ; and including some ethereal , semi-supernatural roots . The picture relies heavily on the thunderous relationship between a troubled woman who gets reacquainted with her adult son ; both of whom marked from a past event marred by an accident that tears them apart . The family's tough-to-follow saga is one of abandonment and reunion , with filmmaker as well as writer Claudia Llosa showing both to be equally taxing in their own ways . The film holds itself at an icy remove from its audience , rendering its characters as impenetrable as if they were encased in ice . Nice performances from Jennifer Connelly as a struggling mummy encounters the son she abandoned 20 years earlier , delving her evolution to becoming a renowned healer , Cilliam Murphy as a peculiar falconer who bears the marks of a double absence and Mélanie Laurent as the young journalist will bring about an encounter between the two main starring . The freewheeling camera often stays close on the important cast , which also includes Oona Chaplin , William Shimell and Ian Tracey . Furthermore , a colorful , cold and evocative cinematography by Nicolas Bolduc . Sensitive and and relaxing musical score by Michael Brook .

This thoughtful , meditative , thought-provoking , but deceptive flick was regularly directed by Peruvian director Claudia Llosa who previously directed the magical realism-infused 2009 drama titled "The Milk of Sorrow" , it told the story of a rare disease transmitted through the breast milk of pregnant women who were abused or raped during or soon after pregnancy . This was her first English-language film titled "Aloft" , like her prior two features — debut "Madeinusa" and Golden Bear-winning follow-up "The Milk Of Sorrow" , "Aloft" boasts Llosa's magnificently lyrical eye for photography and her unassailable slickness to originate a haunted , slightly otherworldly atmosphere even out of banal happenings .

The acting is fine, Jennifer Connelly is always good as is Cillian Murphy and the kid-actors were fine as well.

Visually it's also a nice looking movie, with limited colours that creates and cold and melancholic feeling which suits the movie just fine, because it is rather melancholic.

The movie though is just good enough not to be bad, but far from great.

Needless to say Jennifer Connelly's character is very spiritual and believes in healing, I believe her character is supposed to be Native American although I am not quite sure about this but a lot of her spiritual beliefs stem from them if nothing else.

So it helps if you have some sort of interest in that or at least an open mind because it's not always very up front and direct in it's approach to tell the story with plenty of metaphors and subtlety more so than direct big orchestrated dramatic scenes.

The blu-ray version (at least the one I watched could possibly differ in some countries) is 97 minutes, and not 112 minutes like it says on IMDb.

From what I've heard the version shown on festivals was indeed 112 minutes but it wasn't received that well so they cut it down to 97 minutes for the blu-ray/DVD market.

And although that caught me off guard initially, I'm not quite sure if it would be able to sustain my interest for 112 minutes so this could be one of those times where the cut down version is actually better, although I of course can't be sure about this.

An unusual film about a healer and what it cost her to be one, set in Canada's far north. The three adult principals are flawless. The two child actors are flawless too. If nothing else it's worth seeing these performances which should impress even the most hard-hearted of critics.

The story itself is rather slight. A woman is recognized as having the gift by another healer but her own family problems might not withstand her acceptance of her gift. Aside from that it's about relationships between a mother and her two sons, and perhaps also about a loving mother trying to live mostly through her emotions.

The real value of the film is how it seems to represent a breakthrough for all of the actors involved. Cillian Murphy, Jennifer Connelly, and Melanie Laurent are all unforgettably good. The two McGrath brothers are irreplaceable.

An hour and a half into the movie and I am still not entirely sure what is happening. Seriously what the heck am I watching? Terrible movie. Jumps back and forth between the past and future at unrelated points in the story. Dialog is boring. Hard to follow what is going on. Character development is non-existent. The mother discovers she is a mystic healer. The son keeps and trains and keeps predator birds (falcons specifically). The execution of the premise is even more weird and poorly executed than it sounds. This is a really poorly developed story that never should have been made into a movie. Through its entirety the viewer is subjected to bad writing (no range in vocabulary) with a plot that never really happens. The attempt is to masquerade as some deep art piece. It fails. Film was just a crap indie film or a B-Role movie intended to go straight to RedBox. And even it that low bar to shoot for, if the directors hadn't scored Jennifer Connelly in the lead role it wouldn't have even attracted viewership in that subprime outlet. This movie totally relies on viewer recognizing the star on the DVD cover to entice giving the movie a chance. Its not worth the buck you feed into a Redbox machine to rent it. AVOID and spend the hour and a half of your like doing something more worthwhile like try watching paint dry.

A Spanish-Canadian-French drama; A story about a documentary filmmaker accompanying a falconer who is travelling across a frozen landscape to find his mother, a faith healer whom he hasn't seen for many years. This moody, sombre, slow-paced film has a theme about the world lacking humanity. However, it is long-winded, barely inaccessible, recklessly imposing symbols and metaphors in its style. It lacks impetus because of its ethereal meditation and ponderous tone, which come at the expense of character development. It is difficult for the viewer to make an emotional connection with any of the characters when the important parts of their motives only hatch at the end of the film.