The Eight Mountains
2022 · Charlotte Vandermeersch
For when you want to sink into something big and unhurried — a long, soulful epic about friendship and where you belong, best with a whole evening cleared and your phone in another room. Comfort and ache in equal measure.
What it's about
One summer in the Aosta Valley, Pietro, a bookish boy from Turin, meets Bruno, the last kid left in a dying Alpine village. Over the next four decades the film follows their friendship as it stretches, frays, and pulls them back together — through fathers and their long shadows, a house built by hand on a mountainside, and two very different ideas of what a life should be.
The experience
Slow, spacious, and quietly devastating — it moves at the pace of seasons rather than scenes, and the emotion accumulates until it lands all at once. You come out of it feeling like you've lived alongside these two men, not just watched them.
Performances
Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, real-life longtime friends, play Pietro and Bruno with a lived-in ease that makes decades of history feel genuinely shared — you believe every silence between them.
The craft
The boldest choice is the boxy, almost-square frame: instead of letting the Alps sprawl in widescreen, it makes the peaks tower and presses the two men together inside the image. Adapted from Paolo Cognetti's prize-winning novel by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, it's mountain filmmaking that earns the biggest screen you can find.
Why it matters
It shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022 and marked a leap for van Groeningen and Vandermeersch, directing together in Italian for the first time — a rare case of a beloved contemporary novel arriving on screen with its soul intact.
Reception & legacy: how The Eight Mountains was received, argued over, and remembered →
Paolo Cognetti's Strega Prize–winning novel arrives on screen as a four-decade chronicle of a friendship: Pietro, a bookish boy from Turin, and Bruno, the last child of a dying Alpine village, who meet one summer in the Aosta Valley and spend the rest of their lives converging on and diverging from each other. The Belgian director Felix van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown, Beautiful Boy) co-directs with his partner Charlotte Vandermeersch, both working in Italian for the first time; the film shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022. The masterstroke is the boxy 4:3 frame — a seeming perversity for mountain scenery that turns out to be the point, forcing the peaks to tower rather than sprawl and pressing the two men together inside the image. Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, longtime friends off screen, age across the decades with unusual delicacy, and Daniel Norgren's raw Swedish blues gives the Alps a strangely borderless sound. A rare epic built from stillness, labor, and the turning of seasons.
Lines of influence
- The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) — Van Groeningen's own template of scoring raw grief with American roots music (bluegrass there, Daniel Norgren's Swedish blues here), letting the soundtrack carry the emotional arc a European milieu wouldn't otherwise supply.
- Beautiful Boy (2018) — Same authorial hand tracing a male bond fracturing and reconverging over years through restrained, non-melodramatic naturalist performance rather than plot incident.
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) — Founds the Italian mode of filming peasant labor with documentary patience and a seasonal-cycle structure, agrarian toil observed as the narrative's actual clock.
- Le quattro volte (2010) — Near-wordless observation of alpine/pastoral life where animal husbandry, weather and the turning seasons replace dialogue as the storytelling engine.
- Happy as Lazzaro (2018) — Rural Italian labor shot on grainy stock in a near-square frame, turning the peasant landscape into a mythic, textured surface rather than picturesque backdrop.
- The Wonders (2014) — Coming-of-age staged inside the physical routines of family agrarian work, using boxy framing and non-professional intimacy to bind childhood to the land.
- First Cow (2019) — 4:3 Academy ratio paired with a male friendship built entirely through shared manual labor in the wilderness, the boxy frame pressing the two men against the landscape.
- Old Joy (2006) — Two men whose lives have diverged reunite on a mountain hike, their friendship measured in silence, drift and terrain rather than confrontation.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005) — Decades-spanning intimacy between two men staged against high-country vistas, using aging performances and returns to the same peaks to register the passage of a life.
- Days of Heaven (1978) — Magic-hour landscape framing that turns seasonal agricultural labor into the film's visual rhythm, wide vistas dwarfing the human figures within them.
- Into the Wild (2007) — Literary adaptation of a man's retreat from society into the mountains, treating wilderness as a spiritual test and structuring the film around a singer-songwriter score.
- The Return (2003) — A masculine bond forged and tested on an arduous wilderness trek, rendered in austere, painterly landscape compositions where nature is antagonist and mirror.
- Boyhood (2014) — Uses performers visibly aging across years so that elapsed time itself becomes the film's structure, exactly the four-decade chronicle device deployed here.
- A River Runs Through It (1992) — Literary-voiceover adaptation of brothers bound to and divided by a mountain landscape, the river standing in as the emotional register of the family.
- Il vento fa il suo giro (2005) — Alpine-village realism rooted in local dialect and the seasonal rhythms of high-mountain herding, filming Alpine community life from the inside.
- Cinema Paradiso (1988) — A decades-spanning male friendship structured around departure from and return to a rural homeland, using aging across time and nostalgia as its formal spine.