Three Peaks had a great trailer. A man, his girlfriend and her son, whom he treats as his own, vacation on the mountainside, the boy gets lost, and the man gets hurts trying to find him. I wanted to know what happened plus I love movies about people going into the wild, and things get real. Unfortunately the trailer gave away the latter half of the movie, and the majority of the film consists of static close ups and medium shots of the three people’s faces with very little story to give the movie any momentum to get where we end up. By the end of the movie, I was almost in a comatose state even with the help of coffee.
I’m going to spoil Three Peaks. Alexander Fehling’s acting is completely credible. I buy that he loves this woman and this kid as if they’re already in a committed, long term relationship. Berenice Bejo acts as if she is still dating him and uncertain about their relationship. The movie does not provide enough of a story to show whether or not this personal dynamic has always existed, or if it is a shift due to the ex-husband/father’s ingenious way to invade their vacation. The most visually effective scene in the movie is when the three scatter in separate directions when the ex suddenly is a presence during their vacation. The early scenes of their relationship to each other in space and trying to gauge what the other is thinking is well done, but as an audience, we don’t know them well enough to fully understand if the boyfriend is delusional or getting a raw deal. I’m leaning towards the latter. I think that the story should have shown what they were like before they went on vacation in the first third. We’ve only seen them outside of their routine.
What the trailer for Three Peaks doesn’t show you is that the little boy, not in a supernatural way, but in a dumb kid way, begins to act out because he abruptly no longer likes that his dad is out of the picture and repeatedly puts himself and the boyfriend in life threatening precarious positions. I am a black American woman of Caribbean descent. I come from a strict culture that still believes in spanking. Even if a little kid isn’t hurting you, the second that a child starts showing physical aggression, you don’t let it go, you put a stop to it immediately because the kid won’t stay little, but will still think that behavior is appropriate then it will be too late to stop him, and someone will get seriously hurt. One of my favorite memories is my mom and I walking down the street and witnessing a little boy wacking his parents across the back of their legs with an enormous umbrella. We spontaneously gasped. The boy looked back, and we simultaneously and wordlessly shot him THE LOOK, which has apparently been encoded into my DNA because I certainly didn’t earn it through experience. It was probably the most discipline that he ever had in his short life, and he stopped immediately. His parents had no idea, and if he hasn’t murdered them in their sleep, you’re welcome.
Intellectually I understood that the kid was being dumb and didn’t fully grasp the impact of his actions, but as a human being, I had the opposite reaction of the boyfriend and had the anti-Arctic reaction. At some point, you have to stop saving the kid and save yourself. In theory, save the child no matter what, but in reality, at some point, that kid has to learn to stop doing stupid crap, and the only way that he is going to learn is if he experiences serious consequences to his actions. At the end of the movie, he pulls the same crap with his mother and one of the rescuers. He has learned nothing! Yes, the kid may die, and the relationship is definitely over, but I’m not dying for some kid who is literally doing his best to kill me and his little self. I know that the boyfriend’s selfless, unconditional commitment to the child and his girlfriend is supposed to be moving and reflect how invested he is in this relationship. By the end of Three Peaks, I was aggravated with all these people. He is a better person than me. I would have bounced when the kid tried to slash his wrist. I don’t love anyone more than me. At least mention it to your girlfriend and let her be the disciplinarian since she is acting more distant and suddenly concerned about boundaries.
Also even though the girlfriend should be crucial to Three Peaks since she is what emotionally ties everyone together, she felt underwritten and superficial. She stays behind while the others hike so she can work. What is her work? Why can’t it wait? Who knows! Also maybe it is a European thing, but if you are so worried about your son getting confused with what role the boyfriend plays versus his father, why would you encourage him to sleep in the same space as you and your boyfriend or at least, couldn’t she temporarily stop sleeping in the space with the boyfriend in the new environment so when your son does want to sleep with you, he isn’t also sleeping with your boyfriend as if he is the father. I never really got a strong sense of her as a person. It felt as if they should have had that conversation ages ago. I normally don’t like a lot of exposition coming out of a character’s mouth and prefer when a movie just throws us into a situation to let us figure out what is going on like in the real world, but it did not work here.
I did like how Three Peaks organically informed us that the boyfriend wasn’t the father because if a viewer didn’t see the preview, a viewer wouldn’t know based on the boyfriend and child’s initial closeness that they weren’t father and son. When the rescuers casually say something like, “Let’s find the father,” it is a true gut punch because no one is really looking out for the boyfriend, not even himself.
The way that the boyfriend and child got into danger felt contrived. At dawn, he just randomly puts the boy on his back, and they go hiking. At this point, their relationship is complete trash so on one hand, maybe you try to get some alone time to work things out and recapture the earlier magic, but ON A MOUNTAIN! Again maybe it makes sense if you’re from a mountainous region, but it seemed as if the kid should not have wanted to go so easily and that early just on principle. Up to this point, the kid has been exponentially difficult, but now he wants to hike on your back.
Three Peaks absolutely did not work for me as a meditation on the complicated dynamic of an awkwardly assembled family showing fractures. It relied too much on the acting and the landscape to carry a story that didn’t seem to exist, wasn’t well thought out or not communicated to the viewers. Whoever made the preview should have made the movie.