Reviews
Mountain King – Horror-Comedy Folk Horror
Mountain King is directed by Gabrielle Christensen, co-written by Christensen, Graham Dunn and Simon Louis Ong, and produced by Red Dog Productions. I watched it at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, where it had its East Coast premiere on Sunday October 18.
The film begins in medias res with three characters hiking and camping in the snowy mountains (somewhere) – one of them clearly out there to work on a botany project. Sudden and completely inexplicable violence erupts. It’s an unsettling prologue not least because nothing is clear – where we are, who these characters are, what they’re doing in the mountains, and what happens to them. The cut to the actual beginning of the film, then, feels reassuring in its greater grounding, its greater seeming normalcy. A young woman, Hannah (Hannah Deale) arrives at a chalet in the mountains (in Sweden) in order to try to walk back her indecision at her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. For his part, her boyfriend Gregor (Carter Sirianni) seems rather horrified to see her there and immediately tries to get her to leave. His mother enters, though, and that’s that: Hannah’s staying and is, moreover, now inextricably a part of the family’s Yule ritual, which takes place on the Winter Solstice.
The first act of Mountain King, as Hannah doggedly persists in her determination to be accepted by Gregor’s parents, is hilarious – and Deale proves herself to be an excellent comic actress. I laughed out loud more than once as Hannah tried to connect with Gregor’s parents, struggling desperately to assimilate their increasingly demonstrable strangeness into her frame of reference – to make it ‘normal’ and thus connect with them. For instance, Gregor’s father, Vilhelm (Keoki Trask), tells a traditional story around the fire about a race of beings – the Jötnar – and how one of them was cursed to remain on the Earth because he fell in love with a human woman. In an effort to match his story, Hannah then recounts the plot of Shrek (which is, actually, quite similar!) She also hilariously suggests she may be amenable to dancing around stark naked, she just needs to get to know his parents just a tiny bit better.
Part of the comedy of Mountain King is that the audience realizes things have taken a turn for the really disturbing quite a bit before Hannah appears to. She does eventually get the picture, however, and the film then becomes more of a folk horror / survival horror film than a dark comedy. Deale acquits herself very well in this more serious role, too – and her performance throughout is definitely one of the highlights of Mountain King.
As the film turns from horror comedy to something darker, it becomes an interesting mixture of Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) and Ready or Not (Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, 2019), with a healthy dose of Shrek (2001) thrown in (which is repeatedly referenced explicitly). The Yule celebration involves arcane rituals which Hannah is pulled into participating in (“You’re one of us now,” Gregor’s mother says at one point) even as she becomes increasingly freaks out by them – so much so that the film eventually makes its veer from Midsommar to Ready or Not.
One thing I loved about Mountain King – aside from Deale’s performance and the film’s extremely effective comedy – was the way in which the rituals at the center of the film have psychological and cultural meaning: they’re not just for display or to exploit the seemingly enduring appeal of folk horror. The entire premise of the film is that Hannah couldn’t make herself wholeheartedly commit to marriage with Gregor: he proposes and she temporizes – telling him, essentially, maybe later. The subsequent drama in the Swedish mountains (after she thinks she’s changed her mind) is essentially a long, ritualistic and blood-soaked reprise of Gregor’s question and Hannah’s answer. I highly recommend you go along for the ride and find out what that answer is!
You can check out the trailer for Mountain King on Red Dog Productions’ website.