1 day ago
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Shot on Scotland’s West Highland Way and Cape Wrath Trail and telling the story of two friends who walk those 600km, Bart Schrijver’s majestic second feature is perhaps the ultimate hiking film. Measuredly paced to let us fully sink into the experience, it understands the rhythms and mental accommodations of long-distance walking; even in its awareness of how its pair of protagonists position themselves on the trail and when they rest, it acknowledges the need for solitude and locating inner truths that often drives these undertakings. Its revelations and epiphanies arise at their own pace, never forced.
Lapsed buddies Chris (Bart Harder) and Lluis (Carles Pulido) are reconnecting, backpacks in tow, after 10 years apart. Dutch and Latino respectively, life has taken them in different directions. Chris, judging by the office calls he frequently fends off, is a hectic modern professional, whose next project is kids with his girlfriend. Lluis, on the other hand, doesn’t want them and is, in fact, not sure what he wants; he has ditched his job shooting wedding videos and is now looking to find his creativity. Despite the catch-up time, their basic outdoor stances hint at a more profound divergence: Chris lapping up each new vista, Lluis masochistically trudging on.
After 2022’s Arctic trek Human Nature, Schrijver is well into his directorial stride. Chris and Lluis often appear as minute figures traversing valleys and crags, and – putting human drama into perspective – what we learn about their lives is measured out in sips of spare, allusive dialogue. The director also resists dealing in too much pathetic fallacy; this foreboding landscape is indifferent to the characters’ feelings. Big disclosures – about Lluis’s health, or a beach breakdown that hints that Chris isn’t as stable as he appears – arrive as suddenly as a wild panorama over a hillcrest. Nor is it certain these moments are transformative in the manner of mainstream drama; there and gone as suddenly as the girl walker who likes screaming into the void, they don’t necessarily mean more than anything else in nature.
Perhaps the film’s innate trajectory means Schrijver doesn’t strive as hard as he might in search of a structure. But The North has a kind of purifying and uplifting effect that builds as the hikers approach their destination; a reminder for those interested in cinema going the distance, how the medium – in its commitment, immersion and focus – reaches altitudes TV can’t touch.
