The Eight Mountains

Most movies that tackle the majesty of the Alps reach for the widest lens possible. They want to show you the horizon, the jagged infinity of the range, the sheer "bigness" of it all. But when I sat down to watch The Eight Mountains, I was immediately struck by the fact that the screen was a square. Directors Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen (who previously broke our hearts with The Broken Circle Breakdown) chose a 4:3 aspect ratio, and it’s a stroke of genius. It forces your eyes upward. It emphasizes the peak, the climb, and the claustrophobia of a life lived in the shadow of giants.

I watched this on my couch while eating a bowl of cereal that was about 40% milk-mush, and for some reason, the sliding scale of crunch-to-soggy felt like a weirdly apt metaphor for the protagonist’s drifting life. It’s a film that demands you sit still, which is a big ask in our current era of "second-screening" and TikTok-shortened attention spans. But if you give it the 147 minutes it asks for, it rewards you with something increasingly rare in modern cinema: a story about men that is profoundly tender without being sentimental.

The Verticality of Friendship

The story spans forty years, beginning with a summer in the 1980s when a city boy, Pietro (Lupo Barbiero), meets the last child of a dying alpine village, Bruno (Cristiano Sassella). They are friends, then they are strangers, then, as adults, they become the pillars of each other's lives. When the adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) returns to the mountains following the death of his father, he finds that Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) has stayed exactly where he left him—a man carved out of the local stone.

Marinelli and Borghi are two of Italy's finest exports right now, and their chemistry is palpable. It helps that they are close friends in real life; they previously starred together in the gritty 2015 drama Don’t Be Bad. Here, they communicate in the way men often do: through shared labor. They spend a large chunk of the second act rebuilding a collapsed stone shieling high on a ridge. It’s essentially a three-hour movie about guys building a shed, and yet I found myself more emotionally invested in their masonry than in any CGI multiverse battle I’ve seen lately.

The Tragedy of the Stationary Man

In our contemporary "digital nomad" culture, we often romanticize the idea of "getting away from it all." We post pictures of cabins on Instagram and talk about "rewilding." The Eight Mountains offers a sobering counter-point. It explores the difference between visiting the mountain and being the mountain.

Bruno is a man who cannot—or will not—leave. He represents a dying way of life, trying to run a dairy farm in a world that has moved on to industrial automation and globalized markets. Alessandro Borghi plays him with a rugged, heartbreaking stubbornness. He’s the "center mountain" of the film’s central philosophical riddle: Who learns more? The person who visits the eight mountains around the world, or the person who climbs to the peak of the one in the middle?

The film doesn't give you an easy answer. Pietro wanders the world, seeking meaning in Nepal and in books, while Bruno stays and slowly suffocates under the weight of his own heritage. It’s a cerebral exploration of what "home" actually means. Is it a place you belong to, or a place you’re trapped by? In an era where we are all increasingly untethered from our geography, this question hits harder than it might have twenty years ago.

Peak Craftsmanship

The production of this film is a story in itself. Vandermeersch and van Groeningen are Belgian, but they spent months living in the Italian Aosta Valley, learning the language and the rhythms of mountain life to ensure the film didn't feel like a "tourist" production. It’s a "Slow Cinema" masterpiece that actually moves. The soundtrack by Swedish folk singer Daniel Norgren provides a dusty, haunting atmosphere that keeps the film from feeling too much like a National Geographic special.

Turns out, they actually built that house on the mountain for the film, following the traditional methods shown on screen. There’s a tactile reality to it—the sound of the wind, the way the light hits the snow in the "blue hour"—that makes you feel the cold in your marrow. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to sell your laptop and buy a cow, even though the film is very clear that you’d definitely be dead by winter.

The Eight Mountains is a majestic, quiet epic that feels like a deep breath of thin air. It’s a film about the paths we choose and the people who wait for us at the end of them. If you’ve ever felt the pull of a place you can’t quite explain, or if you have a friend who knows you better than you know yourself, this is essential viewing. It’s a reminder that even in a world of high-speed connections, some things can only be built stone by stone, over decades.