'The Mountain' Trailer: Rick Alverson Delivers Another Surreal Effort, This Time Starring Jeff Goldblum

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It was with 2012’s ironically titled “The Comedy” that director Rick Alverson landed on the radar of many an indie-attuned critic, but he did so as a polarizing figure whose searing brand of anti-humor was alternately lauded as generation-defining and dismissed as drearily indulgent. With 2015’s “Entertainment,” however, the filmmaker managed to earn a fair few converts, leaving us curious as to what uncomfortable places Alverson’s challenging sensibilities could lead him to with his next film, “The Mountain.”

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The movie’s unusual cast could also give this period drama a leg up on the festival circuit. Fresh off the success of “Ready Player One,” Tye Sheridan stars opposite Jeff Goldblum as the pair travel through the Pacific Northwest of 1954. In an interview with IndieWire, Goldblum explained that his character is based on Dr. Walter Freeman, a 20th-century physician who specialized in lobotomies.

READ MORE: Rick Alverson’s ‘The Mountain’ Is A Shimmeringly Surreal Work With Incredible Performances [Venice Review]

Freeman led a career characterized by scandal and controversy, with many of his patients ending up dead or severely disabled. His equivalent in the film is a man named Dr. Wallace Fiennes, who’s acquired a dubious reputation but could be doing business with a new age cult leader, played by Denis Lavant. Goldblum goes on to compare Alverson’s film to “The Florida Project,” assuring us that “at the end of the movie, we see a kind of iconic American mythical ideal, in juxtaposition to the real psyche of America and conditions of America, spiritually and otherwise, which leave something to be desired.”

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Here’s the synopsis for what sounds like a pretty twisted tale:

1950s America. Since his mother‘s confinement to an institution, Andy has lived in the shadow of his stoic father. A family acquaintance, Dr. Wallace Fiennes, employs the introverted young man as a photographer to document an asylum tour advocating for his increasingly controversial lobotomy procedure. As the tour progresses and Andy witnesses the doctor’s career and life unravel, he begins to identify with the institutions’ patients. Arriving at a California mountain town, a growing center of the New Age movement, they encounter an unconventional French healer who requests a lobotomy for his own daughter, Susan. 

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Sheridan, Goldblum, and Lavant star alongside Hannah Gross and Udo Kier. Alverson co-wrote the script with Dustin Guy Defa (the director of “Person To Person“) and longtime collaborator Colm O’Leary (“The Builder“). “The Mountain” made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year. Kino Lorber is releasing the indie in NY and LA on July 26th with a national rollout to follow. Watch the trailer below.