Father and son are estranged, and the difference in their lifestyles divides them further. The boy is such a product of modern civilization that he clings to his phone like a child with a teddy bear. His father mocks him for it, and demands that he leave his phone behind when they head off into the woods for a moose hunt that will require them to live in a hut on a mountain. Things start to go wrong fast, starting with the discovery of the corpse of a moose that was shot and left to decay in a pond by "tourist" hunters who lack Cal's respect for ritual.
A chance encounter with a grizzly bear cub leads to a series of mishaps that force David to mature. It's a credit to the movie that this is never depicted as a necessary step for the boy to become a man. We're always aware of the awful weight of the responsibility that's suddenly been placed upon him. It's just not fair.
Shot by Todd McMullen in a series of elegantly composed, super-wide images, edited with a minimalist flair by Michael Taylor, and scored mostly with mournful, contemplative classical string instruments by Ernst Reijseger, this is a meditation on the rituals and tragic weight of masculinity, as passed down from macho fathers to their sons, and by those sons to their sons. The movie would fit nicely in a film festival comprised of works with a similar theme, including "Legends of the Fall" and "The Revenant" and older wilderness dramas like "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Bend of the River."
Unfortunately, it's largely devoid of humor. And there are times when it leans too hard on the usual signifiers of Tragic Masculinity—particularly when the soundtrack brings in a holy choir to underscore the holy devotion of son to father, and vice-versa, and whenever Cal launches into philosophical frontiersman mode, explaining the mystical communion of man and nature like a graduate fiction writing student who just got back from a camping trip. Much of the latter appears to have been added by the filmmakers, though you can understand why they thought it was necessary: the source material, a 1988 short story by David Quammen, is light on dialogue and heavy on terse descriptions of people doing things.
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