After the movie is over but before the credits there is some explanatory text that makes Sukkwan Island aka My Father’s Island very difficult to review. For one thing, discussing them spoils the entire concept of the film. For another, it blurs the line between fiction and real life in deeply awkward ways. So that said, what Sukkwan Island is about a young man grappling with his father’s legacy through his memories of one deeply misguided year. It’s extremely watchable thanks to two giant central performances, but the flawed concept makes the entire thing extremely tough to enjoy.
For one thing, writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay has moved the Pacific Northwest setting of the novella by David Vann to northernmost Europe. A young man named Roy (Ruaridh Mollica, a star on the rise) makes his way to the remote home of a Finnish bushpilot named Anna (Alma Pöysti), where she recognises him as the son of a man named Tom (Swann Arlaud, more on whom later). The land Tom owned on the remote titular island (accessible by boat in summer but only seaplane in the winter months) has been mandatory-purchased by the government, so this is Roy’s last chance to revisit it. He’s been there before of course; when Roy was in his early teens (an exceptional Woody Norman) Tom was able to convince Roy’s mother (Tuppence Middleton) to let them go live on the island alone together for a year. They had a shortwave radio for regular communications and flares to alert Anna in emergency. They had Roy’s schoolbooks and some survival manuals and a solid CD collection. They had several sleeping bags, axes for firewood and rifles for hunting food. What else could a man and his son need? Well: there are uncooperative animals with different definitions of food. Their little cabin is not weathertight, which Roy noticed but didn’t realise was important until it was too late. The woods and frozen ice are full of dangers and safety is definitely not guaranteed.
Mr. Arlaud, a stalwart of French cinema who delighted the world with his turn as the lovelorn lawyer in Anatomy of a Fall, does the impossible here: he is so charming and charismatic that he can convince his ex-wife to let him do something this insane. Frontier roughnecks in PNW logging country (like the ones in Leave No Trace) would more believably let a child go off-grid, but it’s very, very tough to believe that sensitive Europeans would be so foolhardy. It’s a testament to Mr. Arlaud’s appeal that he sells this utterly. The rapport between Roy and Tom is also never forced, as Tom delights in the chores necessary for brute survival and Roy is a moody teenager for whom everything is less delightful. Mr. Norman does unusually good work as a kid who starts out idolising his dad, but who slowly comes to realise that love is pretty complicated. It’s fair to say that Tom is a more trying dad than most, but he is always focused on his child and almost always instantly does the right thing. Ms. Pöysti doesn’t have much to do except look worried but know better than to interfere, but she makes it clear Roy can trust her and therefore so do we. Amine Berrada’s cinematography does good work in balancing the beauty and the struggle of their surroundings, and the editing and the music largely reflect Roy’s growing understanding of the situation he is in.
Unfortunately it blows the ending. Like really blows the ending, until the explanatory text pops up and forces everything to be reconsidered. You can see why Mr. de Fontenay felt he had no choice but to take this angle, but it’s unusual to see a movie sabotage its own existence like this. On the other hand, the entire experience very thoroughly establishes Mr. Arlaud as a major star we’ll follow anywhere, and Mr. Norman as an actor of importance who will shortly arrive at his own stardom. For those two people Sukkwan Island is very much worth seeing.
Two final things: Roy doesn’t speak French, and it’s a source of sadness to Tom throughout that he isn’t interested in learning. And if someone has written about what the picture of fatherhood and survival in this movie and Leave No Trace have to offer us, I’d love to read it.
Sukkwan Island recently played at the Glasgow Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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