★★★★☆
Dir. Ben Rivers. 2011. N/R. 88mins. Documentary.
They could be images unearthed from another era, perhaps from another planet — a verdant dreamscape of fog and forest, photographed on gorgeously distressed black-and-white film stock with prevalent light leaks and emulsion burn. Our protagonist, it turns out, is human. He’s Jake Williams, a bearded recluse of practically no words (“socks” is his most audible utterance) who lives in a rundown abode in the Scottish Highlands. Things are different here: Time crawls by at an extremely measured pace. Daily tasks are relegated to bare essentials like chopping wood or doing laundry. And enough strange things happen — how exactly does that decrepit mobile home get up into that tree? — that the film’s designation as a documentary seems misapplied.
Director Ben Rivers has filmed Williams before, for his 2006 short “This Is My Land.” This feature-length offshoot adheres to certain particulars of its subject’s life — he does indeed live off the grid — while amplifying the alien strangeness of his existence. One mesmerizing scene captures the bushy-haired subject launching a makeshift raft onto a lake, settling in until the water around him is completely still. In another stunning sequence, we observe as Williams’s face becomes shrouded in total darkness while a fire burns down to ash. Such moments feel like a profoundly harmonic convergence between man and nature, though mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.—Keith Uhlich
