Sightlines · reception

How The Eight Mountains was received

2022 · Charlotte Vandermeersch · The Eight Mountains on Sightlines

The arc

It shared the Cannes Jury Prize in 2022 (with EO) to warm but quiet notices, then did something rarer: grew by pure word of mouth into a Letterboxd favorite, passed between friends with a warning to bring tissues.

What’s debated

The recurring fight is over its two-and-a-half-hour, seasons-drift pacing — devotees say the slowness IS the film, skeptics call it a very long walk uphill.

Its footprint

It's become shorthand for the great male-friendship weepie — a film people cite when arguing cinema rarely takes platonic love between men seriously — and it turned Swedish folk musician Daniel Norgren's songs into instant emotional triggers for everyone who's seen it.

Where it stands

A canon climber: too recent to be canon proper, but already a 'trust me, just watch it' title among Letterboxd's quiet-devastation crowd.

Did you know? Leads Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi are close friends off screen too — they'd already starred together a decade earlier in Don't Be Bad (2015), which is part of why the central bond feels so lived-in.