The Mountain Between Us (2017)

Two attractive professionals, a neurosurgeon and a photojournalist, charter a small plane out of Idaho. The pilot dies of a stroke at the controls, and then there is snow, a Labrador, a broken knee, and the slow arithmetic of survival. Hany Abu-Assad directs with a straight face and a fondness for the wide shot. The film never stops to explain itself, which is its chief virtue. It is a movie about getting off a mountain, and it stays on message.

Idris Elba and Kate Winslet are the pair, and the film's lone quiet cultural gesture is that nobody remarks on the fact that they are of different races. No character mentions it. No subplot turns on it. In 2017 that unremarked pairing was itself a mild novelty for a studio picture, though the film builds nothing on the foundation. Winslet's Alex is a capable photographer with a wedding to get to. Elba's Ben is a widower whose hands will not survive the frost. Competence is the whole of their characterization, and the screenplay trusts that to be enough.

Adapted from Charles Martin's 2011 novel, the film keeps its themes to the old-fashioned variety: endurance, grief, the heart as a muscle. There is no thesis here. No villain drawn from the boardroom, no sermon about the weather that produced the storm, no lesson about the body or the mind. The wilderness is indifferent, and that indifference is the point. When the two reach a timber yard and then a hospital, the story resolves into an ordinary question of whether two people can want each other in the real world. It answers by cutting to black a half second before the embrace. Reviewed at Toronto, released to a shrug, it earned back its budget and little more. There is something restful about a film so thoroughly uninterested in instructing us. The mountain, at least, has no agenda.