Out Stealing Horses

An extraordinary feeling for nature and the seasons of life pervades Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), an ambitious reflection on our responsibility to others from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.

Lushly visual and much of its cinematic power arises from the seductively dreadful space and starkness of the Norwegian landscape in winter. And in the way Mr. Moland and his cinematographer, Rasmus Videbæk, use their delicately detailed, even painterly depictions of the flora and fauna surrounding the film’s very complicated people to put the latter in their cosmic place.

This is a film with a mature, heartbroken understanding of how we hold onto things.

The madeline-like specificity of this memory-driven story is its greatest strength, even if it relies on a rusty structure of nested flashbacks in order to reach the past.

Too subdued for its own good, too stuck in Trond’s head, with his narration, to ever break through. The odd moving moment in a stunning setting — set pieces center around the dangers of small-farm logging — is surrounded by a lot that’s implied, and too little that’s shown.

Moland is telling a tale of paradise lost but Horses is perhaps less remarkable for its plot than it is for its style.

There’s some appreciable serenity and a lot of personal grief on display in Out Stealing Horses, but it’s only visible in fits and starts.