The Father Who Moves Mountains

A new Romanian drama on Netflix. A wealthy father struggled against nature as he would not stop at anything to rescue his son, who was lost in the snowy mountain.

The synopsis really sounded like this movie would be an intense thriller. Instead, this was a deep and bleak character study of a father who tried everything to save his son. Going through Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that many did not like this movie, and I believed that they did not understand the message.

The father character is not a nice person. He's an affluent man who tried to use all his wealth and connections while manipulating and coercing others to help him. For him, others' safety did not matter too much to him. This did not make the father a likable character in audiences' eyes. However, I still found this movie to be powerful despite its depressing color because it showed the resilience and obsession of a parent, regardless of how good of a person the parent is. It should not be surprising that even some of the most evil persons would do anything to keep their loved ones safe. The father character was selfish and a bully, but being on his shoe, I doubt that many parents would do any different.

As I said before, this is not some thriller or tear-jerking drama. It's very slow, and the ending would leave many unsatisfied and even annoyed. However, for me, this ending effectively emphasized the theme of how parents would never give up on their children. Even more powerful was the fact that the movie was based on a true story.

Overall, a unique drama about the power of parental love. 8.5/10.

Fatherhood? Sense of duty? Hubris? Selfishness? Stubborness? Stupidity? I despise most of the behaviours/feelings displayed by the main character but I'm not sure this is why I just disliked the movie.

Trying to dig a little deeper: what was the author's intention? It's not an action movie, not a good thriller, not even a decent drama. The director neither praises neither condemns what he shows, as if trying to be objective, yet it's not a documentary at all (even if it is a supposedly "true" story).

10 minutes total of scattered dialogues depict sufficiently all the relevant things the movie can offer: parenthood shortcomings, fears, and sense of guilt; getting old; the corruptive/corrupted nature of people. The rest is time annoyingly wasted: we are mostly offered nearly 2 hours of a desperate idiot with a certain power that other people second out of pity/duty/interest.

And BTW I wonder what kind of winter storms they had in that year to render mountains of 2000-2500m so impossibly dangerous...

... Said my 12 year old son when the movie ended. This movie is very well made, beautifully acted, cinematography amazing, but.... absolutely horrible story and main character. You just can't believe a human being can be this arrogant and selfish. I understand the ending, it just doesn't do justice to the movie nor does it respect the time the viewer invested in it. Warming: this movie is not about a heroic rescue mission, but about a horribly selfish man.

Update: I gave the movie 2 stars because of how annoying the ending is. But this doesn't do justice to the acting, production and deeper layers of this story. The fact I was disappointed in the ending and in the main character, does not justify giving this well made movie 2 stars. This was not a bad movie. It was just not what I was expecting or what I wanted to see.

This movie explores the characters - their motivations, flaws and faults, against the backstory of their children going missing in the mountains.

Loyalty, connections, stubbornness, grief, are all displayed.

You may not sympathize with the characters, but you can empathize with - what would you do?

I wonder how it comes that the official intelligence service is involved in a private matter. It's a little embarrassment of Romanian democracy with the implication to corruption, isn't it?