The Mountain

For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.

Having dipped a toe into bigger-name casting with his previous feature “Entertainment,” Alverson experiments intriguingly with performance style here, submitting his otherwise rigorously controlled filmmaking to the whims of unpredictably idiosyncratic thesps like Lavant, Goldblum and Udo Kier. It’s a calculated clash that perhaps reflects the film’s own theme of agitated minds at odds with the stoic status quo.

The actor has muted his usual um-ah-YES speech tics and other telltale Goldblumian gestures to a large degree, which works nicely against Sheridan’s revelatory performance. Their existential despair among the mental healthcare white-coat crowd plays and feeds off each other — it’s like discovering a "Waiting for Godot" production nestled in the middle of "Titicut Follies."

Summarizing is futile. The Mountain has productive veins of ore for those willing to mine it. But be aware that finding gems will require sweat equity.

The Mountain is what it is, and any attempt to recapitulate its meaning in some other form (like — ahem — a movie review) is a fool’s errand. With that in mind, it is probably best to set this thought down, and leave it with you: The Mountain is not for everyone, but it is, most emphatically, something else.

Ultimately, Alverson’s The Mountain is arthouse cinema at its frostiest.

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.