‘Sukkwan Island’ Review: A Melancholic Father-Son Bonding Tale That Takes an Increasingly Harsh Turn

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic American writer David Vann’s 2008 book “Legend of a Suicide” is a striking, classification-averse work — not quite fiction or memoir, novel or short story collection — that ultimately amounts to an exercise in potent literary catharsis for its author: Vann veils, rewrites or sometimes fabricates events from his own family history in order to accept and understand the untimely death of his father.

It’s the kind of singularly subjective writing, steered by a personal perspective bound to no storytelling rules but its own, that presents a challenge to any outside interpreters.

So it makes sense that “Sukkwan Island,” French writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay‘s handsome, elegiac take on Vann’s tale, specifically adapts the one segment of the book that is told in the third person: a nearly self-contained novella that finds the author standing outside his own experience, but not outside a grief that pervades both memory and imagination.

Viewers won’t require this context to watch and appreciate “Sukkwan Island,” the bulk of which is a linear and straightforwardly stirring story of a wayward father and his estranged teenage son rebuilding their relationship over several months in the remote, ravishing and punishing Norwegian wilderness.