Out Stealing Horses

At sixty seven, after losing his wife, Trond retreats to an isolated house in Norway. When he works out who his neighbour is, he goes back to the summer of 1948, the summer he was fifteen, spent in the forest with his father, when everything changed. Adapting Per Petterson's novel, Hans Petter Moland does not use memory as a straightforward flashback. The two times meet in the same landscape, sometimes in the same shot. That is the film's best perception: the man is not remembering the past, he is living inside it. Stellan Skarsgard plays the older Trond. The cinematographer Rasmus Videbaek won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution at Berlin in 2019, holding the warm colour of a Norwegian summer and the hard cold of its winter inside one film. The difficulty: it is very slow, events are told obliquely, and the wartime resistance thread stays incomplete for anyone who does not know the novel. Who it is for: viewers who like Scandinavian drama and landscape. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a clear narrative.