Infinite Storm

A solo hike snowballs in this ‘based on a true story’.

Shelter from the storm: Naomi Watts

Pemigewasset Valley Search and Rescue Team volunteer Pam Bales set out for a late-season ascent of New Hampshire's rugged White Mountains along Jewell Trail in October of 2010. Though the hike was one she’d completed many times over, she packed for every eventuality.  What awaited her on the trek to the Presidential summit was unlike anything she could have predicted. Based on the life of Pam Bales and the Appalachia journal article by Ty Gagne, Infinite Storm is an account of survival and loss, grief and grace.

Reminders of time’s passage, along with the initial silence of the vast terrain, yields a baleful feel to Bales’ tale. A hollow melancholy pervades, with the weight of the story resting on the capable shoulders of Naomi Watts as Pam. Though Watts does her best with the material, the outset doesn’t generate enough empathy for Pam before throwing her into the tempest. Certain sequences also feel like big screen inventions, though may conceivably be based on other nature danger from Pam’s life.

Director Malgorzata Szumowska (Never Gonna Snow Again) builds significant tension throughout, but the denouement feels out of place with the rest of the narrative. One resonant line of dialogue seems like the seed for making the film, but when it arrives, the characters aren’t known deeply enough for the moment to really land emotionally. As it turns out, that momentous bit of dialogue is lifted from a longer quote by wilderness advocate, author John Muir. On the plus side are stunning landscape views, a chilling sound design from Ben Baird, an original song by Eliot Sumner, and the uncommon fortitude of Bales herself.

CHAD KENNERK

Cast: Naomi Watts, Billy Howle, Denis O'Hare, Parker Sawyers, Eliot Sumner, Josh Rollins. 

Dir Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, Pro Celine Rattray, Trudie Styler, Jenny Halper, Naomi Watts and Miri Yoon, Screenplay Josh Rollins, based upon High Places: Footprints in the Snow Lead to an Emotional Rescue by Ty Gagne, Ph Michal Englert, Pro Des Katja Soltes, Ed Agata Ciernark and Jarosław Kamiński, Music Lorne Balfe, Costumes Katarzyna Lewinska, Sound Ben Baird. 

Maven Screen Media/Polish Film Institute-Bleecker Street.
104 mins. USA. 2022. US Rel: 25 March 2022. Cert. R.

Thank you to Metropolitan Theatres
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