My Father’s Island

When David Vann was 13, his father committed suicide in a cabin on a remote island off the coast of Alaska. Decades later, Vann – who was born in the US state – channelled his examination of his father’s final days into a 2009 short story collection, Legend of a Suicide, a bestselling awards-magnet whose primary narrative forms the foundation of this bleak midwinter of a film from French director Vladimir de Fontenay (Mobile Homes).

Shifting the setting to a remote Norwegian outpost with fewer humans than bears, My Father’s Island explores the frosty relationship between teenager Roy (C’mon C’mon’s Woody Norman) and his estranged father Tom (Swann Arlaud, best known as Anatomy of a Fall’s dashing lawyer) as they attempt to reconnect following Tom’s divorce from Roy’s mother (Tuppence Middleton). The forbidding Arctic landscape – temperatures can fall to minus 30 degrees overnight – provides a suitably chilly backdrop for their attempted rapprochement. This is complicated not only by Roy’s resentment at his father’s absence and serial infidelities, but also by Tom’s debilitating depression, which manifests both as violent episodes and startling outbursts of mercurial behaviour. 

Rising star Woody Norman gives a blistering performance

Naturally, the film stands or falls on the two lead performances. Both are exemplary, and de Fontenay rewards his actors by focusing more on the inherent drama of their relationship than on taking the easy win of, say, nail-biting battle with a hungry bear, a noble instinct that does have the effect of robbing the film of some of its dramatic potential. De Fontenay seems equally resistant to showcasing the inhospitable crags and peaks of the island itself (filmed in northern Norway), as though the director is allergic to the kind of cliché that might lead a critic to suggest that the landscape itself is ‘a character in its own right’. Even the powerful third act revelation is arguably undermined by the opening scene, in which we see an older Roy (Ruaridh Mollica) embarking on an emotional return to the island following his father’s funeral.

All of which is to say that My Father’s Island isn’t quite the triumph it could have been, yet it’s by no means a failure. Rising star Norman gives the kind of blistering performance that earned the then-13-year-old a BAFTA nomination for his startlingly assured turn as Jesse in C’mon C’mon, while Arlaud evokes sympathy for Tom, despite being the kind of father figure whose flaws cannot all be blamed on his mental health.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jul 3.