Beautifully shot, directed and acted, this is an understated but poignant exploration of grief and compassion. This quietly powerful story with its subtle, deep portraits of people's inner lives, their suffering and healing, is moving exactly because it avoids the traps of pushing the easy buttons and exploiting emotions in a simplistic way. And while the movie is slow and achingly sad at the beginning, it is by no means a "difficult" or "abstract" film to watch. The people, though they are clearly superb actors in a drama and not documentary subjects, are as earthy as they come, and they are real to the viewer in the way that great actors in a classic play are real (the main character brings to mind the great Bruno Ganz). The picture was shot in Switzerland, in a region I am myself familiar with, and the stark and beautiful landscape provides a wonderful metaphor for the foreground drama. However, this is not a particularly "Swiss" movie; rather, the characters are archetypes, and their drama is a universal drama, that is unfolding in many places and ways as we speak.
Review of Tout un hiver sans feu
