Infinite Storm
Coming off the high of the wonderful mountain survival story The Summit of the Gods late last year, I was eager to dive back into a harrowing and frigid tale of perseverance against all odds. Unfortunately, Małgorzata Szumowska’s Infinite Storm felt doomed from the start by poor character motivation and run-of-the-mill storytelling.
Based on the true story of an unlikely and somewhat bizarre mountainside encounter, Infinite Storm recounts a day in the life of Pam Bales (Naomi Watts), a volunteer mountain rescue guide and avid hiker. After discovering an ill-equipped and half-dead man (Billy Howle, Dunkirk) on a snow-swept New Hampshire summit, Bales must fight the deteriorating weather, dangerous terrain, and suicidal actions of her charge as they navigate their way to safety. As one might expect, the rules of genre adherence insist that one predictable calamity after another be thrown at our protagonist, but that’s not what irks me about this film.
What really gets under my skin is the lazy and manipulative way in which the filmmakers disingenuously force character depth onto Bales. It isn’t enough to allow her to simply be a badass woman who saves a stranger’s life and the odd events that occur once they’ve reached safety. No, she has to be running to a mountaintop to escape the grief of her dead children — of which, by the way, there is no mention of anywhere in the 2018 article by Ty Gagne that serves as the film’s source material.
And while there are certainly other issues to point out — such as a peculiar sense of pacing caused by a lower-third clock that passes the time at seemingly random intervals, and a near-complete lack of palpable or believable tension — it’s this ham-fisted backstory that leaves me on such a sour note. The truth is, we’ve seen this story before, and we’ve seen it told much better — and without all the tacked-on melodrama.
Grade: C-minus. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, the FIne Arts Theatre, and Grail Moviehouse.
(Photo: Bleecker Street)
