#Urmas E. Liiv

[adamwatchesmovies]

Ghost Mountaineer (2015)

A 0-star movie like H.P. Lovecraft’s Two Left Arms isn’t merely bad; it’s traumatic. You end up hating it so much you need to expunge its poison from your body by telling someone about it but they’ll never understand what it was like to sit through that ordeal. Nonetheless, sharing gives you some kind of closure because it’s all over… until you stumble upon another film just like it. Ghost Mountaineer is just like ‘H.P. Lovecraft’s Two Left Arms’. The story is incomprehensible, except when it’s so basic you could fall asleep for twenty minutes and still understand everything that happened. The filmmaking style is all over the place. The horror is non-existent. The characters are blank templates. It stretches the definition of “a movie” and since I suffered through it, I’ve got to tell you what it was like.

Based on a true story, a group of amateur geologists go searching for rare minerals in the Siberian mountains. When the group’s leader, Olle (Reimo Sagor), disappears after an avalanche, his friends Eero (Priit Pius), Marleen (Hanna Martinson), Anne (Liis Lass) and Margus (Veiko Porkanen) go to a nearby village for help. Unfortunately for them, the locals are not friendly.

This movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Sometimes, it offers up shots that make it look like it’s going to be a found footage film. Then, it’ll switch to a point of view that makes it look like it’s the real people re-enacting the events before the camerawork becomes conventional. Is it a documentary? a fictional dramatization? Who knows?! What it certainly isn’t is "scary" thanks to the incoherent story.

At one point, our heroes start having dreams that might be hallucinations or premonitions. The way they react to them will have you scratching your head. In one of those dreams, the group sees a mob coming their way. One of the griends hides under a bed to hide. Suddenly, another character will wake up. What do they see? Their friend hiding beneath the bed. What happened? Were they sleepwalking? Was it a dream for one person and real for another?

You’re wondering about this title. Ghost Mountaineer? Is this the film’s “monster”? No, not at all. The only time we see this “ghost” is in a scene that I'm not even sure happened. Eero explains that before Olle disappeared, he spotted a strange figure in the distance, a figure that mysteriously vanished. Ooooooh! Could it be related to the ghost story he told around the fire a couple of nights ago, the ghost story he was clearly making up as he went along? It doesn't matter. The real threat is these people's own stupidity and the unhinged Militia man (Vadim Andreev) who leads the small town in which they seek refuge. I know they're stressed out, and more than a little traumatized by the disappearance of their friend, but these young adults make so many dumb mistakes it’s like they want to die.

If the characters were in any way relateable instead of a gang of aggravating losers, this scenario could actually be unsettling. It’s a frozen wasteland of a town so the morgue is filled with corpses - the ground is too hard to dig graves so they have to store them until winter - there’s something off about everyone they meet. The place screams GET OUT! but they take so long to realize something is off they're unable to leave by the time the danger is clear - partially because the map they used to navigate the mountains looks like it came from the back of a family restaurant placemat. With all their alcohol and drugs weighing them down, with their decision to constantly rely on people with no survival skills whatsoever, you know they stand no chance of escape, and not in a "it's a horror movie, desperate scenarios are good" kind of way.

This attempt at storytelling takes your hopes, stuffs them into a sack and then dashes them against a wall until the screams stop. In one scene, the sixteen-day trip has people freezing to death. In the next, the friends are living it up, laughing and having a great time joking around, wondering who will get together with who. Is this a horrifying ordeal, or a vacation? On second thought, never mind. If we give this movie any attention, it’ll start getting really pretentious and next thing you know, it’ll have a bunch of “deep” scenes shot entirely in black and white. Oh, that’s coming up next, isn’t it?

Tedious in its attempt to be a sophisticated Nordic Noir horror film, Ghost Mountaineer will have you begging for something - anything - scary. It’s a confused mess with nothing interesting to say and nothing worthwhile to show. (October 1, 2021)