Review: Walking Out puts survival on the line

A PUNISHING drama that sometimes stumbles, but Walking Out is a spartan frontier frama you can’t help but urge to regain its footing and keep pushing on.

A LITTLE movie unfolding on an incongruously large stage, adapted from a short story with a long tale to tell.

With such an unorthodox production scale and scripting pedigree, it is immediately apparent Walking Out is promising no ordinary screen experience.

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When it does deliver, you can sense you are in the presence of something special.

However, even when Walking Out stumbles, you can’t help but urge this spartan frontier drama to regain its footing and keep pushing on.

First of all, let’s a take a look at the film’s spectacular, deceptively seductive setting: a remote mountain range in Montana, known to what few locals that dare live there as The Crazies.

Fifteen-year-old David (Josh Wiggins) has made a reluctant annual pilgrimage to the region.

Matt Bomer in a scene from film Walking Out

Most of the year, he lives with his mother in the big smoke. Then for a few short weeks, he is bundled off to the backblocks of Montana to bond with a father he has never properly gotten to know.

Backstory is close to non-existent in Walking Out, so the reason why David’s father, Cal (Matt Bomer) is living off the land as a virtual hermit is never really addressed.

What will ultimately matter is whether the pair can find a way to survive a sudden ordeal thrust upon them when a day’s hunting goes horribly awry.

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Both Cal and David have sustained serious injuries after happening upon a situation provoked by an unseen, unscrupulous fellow hunter.

Shelter, supplies and warmth are some considerable distance away. The elements will keep turning against Cal and David every step of the way. With its spare use of dialogue and a brusque manner in charting the selective mood swings of nature out on the frontier, Walking Out is not going to accommodate the tastes of all viewers.

But there is a steel in its spine and a glint in its eye that will draw the full attention of those who appreciate these qualities in films such as The Revenant and Wind River.

WALKING OUT (M)

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Directors: Alex and Andrew J. Smith

Starring: Matt Bomer, Josh Wiggins, Bill Pullman.

Live and let stride

Originally published as Review: Walking Out puts survival on the line