The Phantom in Lost Mountain (2021)

It feels like a passion project for someone who really dreams of making movies…

but are not quite there in terms of skills.
I could feel that a lot of care was put into this movie and it was taken seriously. I could also feel all the limited resources and how they impacted the final result. The plot had quite a number of twists, but the writing and directing was not smooth and detailed enough to truly tell the story well.

I think one of the biggest issues I had was the fact, I was not exactly on board with male lead. I don’t know how old he is supposed to be, but clearly old enough to know better. Yet he acted like a teenage boy. Sure, his mother would not win an award for the best parent, but he completely disregarded her struggles and just dumped all his grievances - whenever justified or not - on her. Dude had some issues and I struggled with rooting for him.

As for the storytelling - it was a bit confusing. The main lead investigates the attack on his grandpa, keeps referring to the attacker as a killer, barely does anything, but still finds more information than the police? And there is also a dirty lady in the forest that lurks here and there. Also a lot of focus on romance and romantic feelings people have. It all does make sense at the end, but to get there, you need to truly push forward feeling like nothing connects and it’s just a few random scenes put together.

Every character had their traumas, and they yelled about their traumas… and yet we as viewers did not really know what said traumas were. Everything felt extremely detached and awkward because of that.

The acting was decent. Some actors did better than the others, some scenes and lines felt more natural than the rest. Nothing major to praise nor to complain about.

The production was kind of all over the place. The transitions between the scenes were distracting and rough. They had hard-cut the background music during some scenes, not to mention some choices of the songs were rather questionable. The views though, some were quite beautiful. Also… I was over 6 minutes into the movie and they still kept showing credits here and there…

Overall, it dragged painfully. 30 minutes in I felt like I already watched 2 hours. It picks up by the end, but I feel like too much information and actions are dumped in that last 20 minutes so the whole pacing of the movie is off.

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