Culture

Directed by Shinsuke Sato, (2.5/5).
 

A prizewinner at both the Berlin and London film festivals, How I Ended This Summer is set and shot amongst the remoteness of the Arctic Circle. Amongst this breath taking landscape, two meteorologists operate a weather station, gathering detailed hourly readings for transmission across a crackly radio which is their only link to the outside world.
Sergei, the gruff senior of the duo, takes his work very seriously but his new partner, Pavel, is young and flighty, only on the island to write a college essay titled ‘How I Ended this Summer.’ It is apparent that they are both to monitor radioactivity of some description, but it’s unclear what lies buried there or what they are to do should the readings spike. Without any particular reason or motivation, Pavel keeps to himself an urgent message that comes through the radio involving the possibility of Sergei’s family being dead. For reasons we’re left to infer, he never lets Sergei know until we have been forced through two thirds of a film where one character is afraid of his own shadow, and the other is purely oblivious to the situation.
Thank God Pavel finally spills his secret and the film escalates to a thrilling climax as, like a desperate trapped animal, he flees, scrambling down craggy slopes, splashing through the icy waters around the shoreline, whimpering and cursing, and nearly freezing to death. In Pavel’s mind, he and Sergei play the game of hunter and prey. Subtle brooding contorts into fear as the realisation hits him that there is no judicial impasse at the end of the world. ‘Men have gone mad out here’, Sergei tells Pavel at the beginning of the film, demonstrating to him the holes in their grimy house as proof.
The plot may sound exciting but its glacial pace is torturous. Just imagining what it would be like to live in such a place is terribly bleak and enough to put anyone off. However, to give it something, the cinematography and sound design offer a light at the end of the tunnel for being nothing short of superb. Add a stray polar bear and a political allegory and it has the potential for some to consider it great.