Review: ‘The Mountain’ reaches new heights of tedium

This is the kind of movie that gives art-house movies a bad name.

Seeing as it’s about lobotomies in the 1950s, it is also ripe for “ice-pick- through-the-eye” jokes about the pain of watching it. But I would never stoop so low.

Tye Sheridan (“Ready Player One”) is Andy, a young man whose father has just died and whose mother has been stashed away in an asylum. He meets one of her former doctors (Jeff Goldblum), who offers to bring Andy on the road, photo-documenting his eyebrow-raising work at various mental hospitals.

This all happens very, very, VERY slowly, as if filmed through molasses. Director Rick Alverson does visually capture the frightening sterility and anguish in these institutions in a striking way, but he never allows the viewer to move closer than arm’s length to what’s taking place. He appears to be more interested in creating handsome dioramas than exploring the humans contained within them.

Thank goodness for Goldblum, a warm and weird presence who’s incapable of being tedious even in a film that all but demands it of him. His Dr. Wallace Fiennes is slowly, drunkenly falling apart every night after he performs the increasingly frowned-upon procedure of lobotomizing patients, sentencing them to a life of near-catatonia.

Eventually, the father of one such victim, Jack (Denis Lavant), who seems to have wandered in from a David Lynch movie, rants in partial French at Andy about the meaninglessness of art, specifically the titular mountain in a painting. Well, then: Rather than suffer through “The Mountain,” do yourself a favor and spend your ticket money on a nice picnic outside, mountainous or otherwise.

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