Hemingway isn’t as cool as he was once. The fulsome masculinity of his best-known characters, his honest frontiersman perspective, his historical past of bodily and psychological abuse (explored in Ken Burns’s characteristically exhaustive documentary). However his affect on “Legend of a Suicide,” David Vann’s 2008 brief story assortment in regards to the dying of his father in 1980, when Van was 13, means that outdated Ernest nonetheless has loads to supply.
“Sukkwan Island,” the 150-page novella inside “Legend of a Suicide” on which Vladimir de Fontenay’s drama relies, is imbued with the identical parochial male psychological misery that enflamed Hemingway and his work. The wilderness has all of the solutions. The one factor stopping you out of your future is your self. Individuals — particularly ladies — simply get in the best way. You get the concept.
De Fontenay’s adaptation is most charitably seen as an exploration of that old school, these days distant taste of despair. In an period earlier than males had been anxious about modernity and their “position,” and lengthy earlier than they began speaking about their emotions, the forest simply appeared like the reply to each query. It’s undoubtedly the reply for Tom (Swann Arlaud, who chances are you’ll keep in mind because the horny lawyer from “Anatomy of a Fall”), who drags his son Roy (Woody Norman) to the island in southeast Alaska, the place he has purchased land.
Roy is the protagonist, actually, and de Fontenay’s movie — like Vann’s e book — is instructed from the attitude of a son more and more fearful about his dad, who appears to have put dangerously little sensible thought into his grand scheme. Tom revels of their isolation, discovering it nourishing (at the least in precept). Roy simply misses house.
In contrast to the desolate panorama, which de Fontenay (maybe mistakenly) makes very fairly, that setup is fertile land for drama. It’s straightforward to see why Vann spent a decade writing “Legend of a Suicide,” and seems to have spent many years fascinated with the time he spent hanging out along with his father. The suicide of Vann’s father is the lens via which he views his personal angst, an evidence for his inside struggles as a lot as a cautionary story for the way to not deal with it — and the place. However de Fontenay dilutes probably the most hanging features of the e book in favor of a slicker story: not like Vann’s repressed narrator, Roy appears to be well-liked with ladies, likes soccer, and lives a busy and seemingly glad life along with his mother within the metropolis. Vann describes himself as a precocious introvert who desires to study the methods of the land. For the Roy of de Fontenay’s movie, it is senseless for him to need to spend a 12 months along with his dad.
And although it’s billed as one, “Sukkwan Island” is essentially not a psychological thriller like Vann’s e book — which is expressionistic, generally dreamlike, and has an audacious plot twist that propels the second half to a surprising climax that has no relationship with actuality. Aesthetically talking, “Sukkwan Island” is far too fascinated about actuality. Removed from an allegorical horror story, it’s a reasonably muted household drama, with not one of the austere imagery that sticks within the head and makes “Legend of a Suicide” really feel genuine.
Arlaud and Norman, although fantastic actors — as evidenced of their breakout roles in “Anatomy of a Fall” and “C’mon C’mon,” respectively — are signs of and contributors to the movie’s over-aestheticised strategy. The script provides Arlaud little, and he appears to deliver no interiority, a reasonably egregious error in a film about psychological disturbance. A Joel Edgerton kind, rugged and aggressive and empty, would give rather more by giving a lot much less. In Norman’s case, it feels extra like miscasting. He seems to be an excessive amount of like an actor, wearing immaculate garments and something however scruffy. Crucially, he’s too snug, in a job that needs to be something however.
“Sukkwan Island” has the identical horrifying plot twist because the novella, however all of de Fontenay and the actors’ choices appear to be main it in one other course. Within the e book, the twist is hanging and thought-provoking. The best way “Sukkwan Island” tells it, it feels someplace between random and manipulative, a clear ploy to elicit most ache.
De Fontenay’s first mistake is in setting “Sukkwan Island” within the current. That makes its portrayal of Tom’s outdated world angst really feel uncanny. It by no means recovers from missing what makes the e book nice. By no means thoughts the truth that the claustrophobia of the wilderness, a central theme of the story, is lessened whenever you’ve obtained an iPhone.
Very similar to Tim Burton adapting Mike Teavee in “Charlie and the Chocolate Manufacturing facility” to like video video games — it’s in his title! — de Fontenay’s aesthetic selections defeat the purpose of “Sukkwan Island.” De Fontenay has undoubtedly chosen story to inform. And it’s good that extra readers could now uncover Vann’s fantastic e book. However “Sukkwan Island” feels most like a possibility missed.
Grade: C
“Sukkwan Island” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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