Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Sukkwan Island’ Review: A Melancholic Father-Son Bonding Tale That Takes an Increasingly Harsh Turn
American writer David Vann’s 2008 book “Legend of a Suicide” is a striking, classification-averse work — not quite fiction or memoir, novel or short story collection — that ultimately amounts to an exercise in potent literary catharsis for its author: Vann veils, rewrites or sometimes fabricates events from his own family history in order to accept and understand the untimely death of his father. It’s the kind of singularly subjective writing, steered by a personal perspective bound to no storytelling rules but its own, that presents a challenge to any outside interpreters. So it makes sense that “Sukkwan Island,” French writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay’s handsome, elegiac take on Vann’s tale, specifically adapts the one segment of the book that is told in the third person: a nearly self-contained novella that finds the author standing outside his own experience, but not outside a grief that pervades both memory and imagination.
Viewers won’t require this context to watch and appreciate “Sukkwan Island,” the bulk of which is a linear and straightforwardly stirring story of a wayward father and his estranged teenage son rebuilding their relationship over several months in the remote, ravishing and punishing Norwegian wilderness. But it does make greater sense of an eleventh-hour reframing of events on screen that, shorn of any surrounding text, lands as a structural twist rather than an emotional coup — undoing feelings that the audience can only reconsider and reinvest as the closing credits roll.
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It’s hard to see how any screenwriter might have replicated the impact of Vann’s on-paper epiphany. De Fontenay’s first feature since his festival-traveled 2017 debut “Mobile Homes,” “Sukkwan Island” feels an evocative but incomplete attempt to do so, though the grace of its assembly, and of Swann Arlaud and Woody Norman’s excellent performances, should attract international arthouse buyers following the film’s Sundance premiere.
Understandably, this fully European production relocates the events of Vann’s book from Alaska to a comparably spectacular, forbidding landscape of Nordic fjords, and updates them from the early 1980s to the 21st century. Not that you’d really know the difference, give or take some modern outerwear trends and the odd appearance of a signal-free cellphone, in the off-the-grid location chosen by fortysomething Frenchman Tom (Arlaud) to commune with both nature and his 13-year-old son Roy (Norman), of whom he’s seen precious little since he and Roy’s British mother Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton) broke up some years before. When Tom proposes that Roy leave the U.K. for a year of homeschooled, character-building adventure with him in farthest-flung Scandinavia, both mother and son are understandably wary. What brings Roy to ultimately join his father is the first of the film’s enfolded, withheld revelations.
The rickety, isolated waterside cabin that Tom has rented for the year can only be reached by a seaplane that in turn can only be flown by kindly, weary Anna (“Fallen Leaves” star Alma Pöysti, a warm, welcome presence), a resident of the nearest town, which of course isn’t so near. She checks in sporadically with supplies and a lifeline radio, but otherwise, father and son are on their own in a retreat where the occasional hungry bear is their only potential visitor. It is the summer, and at first, for both men, the sheer, unbound newness of the experience is as bracing as the permanently icy fjord water in they have to bathe. Tom and Roy are tentative around each other, but not hostile, as de Fontenay’s adaptation honors Vann’s avoidance of well-worn clichés regarding absent fathers and angry adolescent sons: It’s moving to watch them observe each other, testing out unfamiliar gestures of empathy and affection, and sometimes falling short.
As the winter sets in, however, this bonding experiment becomes more of an endurance test, as tempers are shortened by the physical and practical challenges of living through the freeze — while Tom’s mental health begins to fray, clearly not for the first time. Arlaud, now best known to international audiences as the quietly tenacious lawyer in “Anatomy of a Fall,” is inspired casting as this alternately alpha and boyish figure, and delivers a delicate, gradually heartbreaking performance of paternal tough love barely masking his own gaping need for care. He’s well-matched by Norman, the prodigious young star of Mike Mills’ 2021 film “C’mon C’mon,” who’s disarming as a kid whose put-on sangfroid gives way all too quickly under pressure to panic. In tandem, the performances deftly identify several shared personality traits between father and son, even if the characters might not see those themselves.
Bracketing this increasingly devolving scenario are scenes of the adult Roy (Ruaridh Mollica, “Sebastian”) visiting the cabin a decade later, burdened by inferred grief and trauma — an addition to Vann’s story that cues the film’s abruptly recalibrated perspective, but doesn’t quite match the stark weight of the book’s terse, heartsore prose. What does is the austerely expansive imagery conjured by DP Amine Berrada (“Hounds,” “Banel & Adama”), whose camera appears to regard this extraordinary landscape with equal parts wonder and chilly apprehension, and an undertone of bruisey blue emphasized in snow, sky and skin alike. Viewed with this admiring, ominous reserve, the wilds and waters of Sukkwan Island remain unknowable to the last. De Fontenay’s affecting but frustrating film has its reasons for that distance.
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