The Eight Mountains review – overlong friendship drama isn’t worth the arduous trek

A handsome yet airless adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning 2016 novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains sees childhood pals Bruno and Pietro (Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli) reunite after fifteen years – older, quieter, with bristlier chins – atop the mountain where the seeds of their friendship were first planted. As an assemblage of tourist footage for Alpine Italy, or perhaps a commercial for a North Face-adjacent clothing brand, the film works; yet it falls far short of convincing us of a connection between the two men it so desperately wants us to root for, instead offering a bloated 147-minute film entirely lacking in stakes and betraying an over-reliance on its literary roots.

Felix Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown, Beautiful Boy) is joined behind the camera by his real-life partner Charlotte Vandermeersch, an actress and now first-time director, for dual credits. They priotize the stunning landscape just as much as they do their actors, with Tom Hooper-esque framing that relegates characters at the extreme edges of the frame, allowing the mountain scenery to loom into prominence. All these sloping hills, buildings and skylines reflect the many different paths our central pair could take – a set of endless, overwhelming options.

Bruno and Pietro grow up together in the foothills of Grana, a lush and mountainous commune close to Turin in Northern Italy. We pick up and the discard the childhood segment rather quickly, cutting quickly between various scenes of frolicking in grassy hillsides instead of meaty, meaningful moments, a decision that ultimately kneecaps the later scenes – it’s hard to believe that there is or was such a lofty, life-changing connection between these two people, romantic, platonic, or otherwise.

As time passes, in particular we follow Pietro’s rootless journey from the city to the country, to Nepal and then back again, as he uses wanderlust as a way to cope with feelings of loneliness. He is suitably anguished by his frittered relationship with his father, and the almost fraternal resentment he feels towards Bruno, who played the ersatz son in his place.

But the resultant ennui-amid-nature plays out like diet Kelly Reichardt, with Marinelli’s emotions often repetitive and impenetrable to a fault. We’ve seen better films about male friendship that emerge slowly as words form clumsily over the years; here, the emotional crescendo falls limp. Vandermeersch and Van Groeningen are clearly striving for an epic narrative told through tiny gestures, but the result feels small and dissatisfying, and the film deals in the hollow romanticising of nature that its own protagonist parries against. There are clear hints at potential homosexuality, too, suggested and then never addressed again; a frustrating, unsolved thread trailing along in the background of every scene.

There’s an emptiness, too, in the film’s broad themes of “nature” and “connecting to the earth”’ and “fatherhood” – each stubbornly closed-off in a way that refuses to engage with any of the topics so that the viewer is actually beckoned into the fray. The years plod by aided alongside grating voiceover and an over-reliance on music; Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren provides the film’s many songs which, while beautiful in their own right, feel like a cheap way to hit emotional beats.

The feeling prevails that this would all play out more successfully as a novel, and so perhaps something has gone amiss in the adaptation stage here. Considering the setting and the acting talent at hand, it’s a crying shame. The Eight Mountains may aim for dizzying heights, but this isn’t an expedition that justifies the view.

The Eight Mountains was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2022. It is released in UK cinemas on 12 May.