Andy has ulterior motives for going along. Wallace Fiennes -who treated Andy's mother for an unnamed illness-steps into the scene, inviting Andy to come along with him on one of his trips: he needs a photographer. Long ago, she was put into an institution and Andy never learned her fate. Andy is a teenager, but he is weighed down by anxiety, tormented by the absence of his mother. (Elizabeth Warn's work as costume designer is brilliant throughout.) Sheridan has barely 20 lines through the whole film. His heavy woolen jacket, baggy trousers, boots, all emanate a kind of working-class 1950s aesthetic, no color brighter than a dull green. He wanders through the bowels of the building, smoking, staring into space. Andy is a silent presence, slouching on the edge of the rink, watching the girls in their grey skirts twirl and jump. Here he plays Andy, a young man who works at an ice rink where his father-a forbidding German former figure skater ( Udo Kier)-trains young girls. This is young Tye Sheridan's second collaboration with Alverson, and he is also listed as an Executive Producer. Alverson's almost glacial approach to this terrible subject is undeniably provocative, and galvanized by Jeff Goldblum's truly creepy mad-scientist performance as Dr. Eventually his services were no longer needed, as lobotomies were phased out, replaced by more humane treatment with drugs and psychotherapy. The majority of his patients were women and/or gay people and-in one case-a four-year-old child. Freeman traveled the United States, visiting mental institutions, performing lobotomies on an assembly line, documenting it all with photographs. It was a much easier procedure than cracking open the skull, and it worked for Freeman since he had no surgical training. Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy, where the 'doctor' inserted an ice pick through the patient's eye socket. Taking place in the 1950s, in America's bleached-out autumnal heartland, 'The Mountain' appears to be loosely based on the life of Walter Jackson Freeman II, a 'physician' who specialized in lobotomies.

The mountain