REVIEW | Lisa Fremont
- Director: Gabrielle Christensen
- Writer: Gabrielle Christensen, Graham Dunn, Simon Louis Ong
- Stars: Hannah Deale, Carter Sirianni, Irina Malygina
Were it not for the cold open, a viewer could easily forget they’re watching a holiday horror film and, instead, become invested in the romantic comedy of Mountain King, and this is a huge compliment.
Hannah is that girl we all know: she has undiagnosed ADHD, a quick wit, and a burning desire to reconcile with her boyfriend, Gregor. So much so that she has followed him to his family home in Scandinavia to win him back after she turned down his marriage proposal. Arriving in her high-fashion city clothes, she is the antithesis of the pictureperfect cabin she enters to surprise him. In a Nordic gender swap of the She’s All That stairway scene, Gregor descends the stairs of his gorgeous mountain cabin, with a chiseled jawline and a perfectly maintained beard, while wearing the mandatory chunky knit cable sweater, and you can practically smell the testosterone and fresh-baked cookies of this Hallmark Christmas movie scene. And you can feel the panic when he sees Hannah standing there in her all-black attire and Louboutin heels. One of these things is not like the other, and she’s not going anywhere.
Hannah, a quick-witted and politely bitchy force of nature played by Hannah Deale (The Annihilator), keeps the comedy moving as she tries to win Gregor back and win over his parents. Carter Sirianni plays Gregor, and he does a fantastic job of stoically playing off of Hannah’s chaos while placating the parents he hasn’t seen for ten years. As Hannah meets the parents, Ingrid (Irina Malygina) and Vilhelm (Keoki Trask), we begin to see that Gregor may have valid reasons for not coming home for the past decade.
Writer Gabrielle Christensen’s feature directorial debut is a seamless blend of folk horror and romantic comedy with a holiday setting to boot. She utilizes the surrounding snow-covered forest masterfully to hint at the monsters that lie within as they slowly encroach on the familie’s Yule festivities.. Of course, nothing is as it seems, and as the chaos escalates, we are treated to great makeup and practical effects that partner perfectly with Malygina and Trask’s performances. Somehow, they both manage to be charming with an underlying menace that Hannah, understandably, wants to connect with.
As all the story details come together in a foretold conclusion, the horror/fairy-tale/ tragic-romance of it all is a breath of fresh air in our current landscape of endless sequels and trauma-horror. Mountain King does so much with a little bit and does a bang-up job of mixing genres, giving us likable characters and a fun horror story.
Played at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival
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