Like the best sports documentaries, Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s revelatory portrait of Japanese high school baseball is as much about the game as the culture that surrounds it. Stream it on Criterion Channel or rent it on Amazon Prime Video. This Daniel Sandu film stays delicately balanced between both these possibilities, with the steep, stark setting providing an elemental backdrop for existential quandaries. Is his refusal to accept the writing on the wall an admirable streak of parental devotion or a relic of an era when bureaucrats always got their way? Meanwhile, the weather grows worse, endangering the men Mircea bullies and bribes into what increasingly feels like a futile quest. Mircea calls in the intelligence services to set up an illegal high-tech search operation, which piques the suspicions of local journalists and invites pleas from the relatives of other lost trekkers for Mircea’s help. He insists on following the rescue team up the slopes, despite the inclement weather, and lashes out at their seeming slowness.īut his anguish soon blurs into indignation. When Mircea Jianu (Adrian Titieni) first learns of his son’s disappearance, his reactions are what one would expect from any parent in his shoes: panic, despair, anger.
Following an intelligence officer whose son goes missing on a blizzard-stricken mountain, this slow-burning Romanian film deepens familiar Hollywood templates - a father’s relentless quest to save his child a battle of man against nature - into a complex ethical drama about the blurred lines between desperation and hubris.
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