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. Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy, where the "doctor" inserted an ice pick through the patient's eye socket. It was a much easier procedure than cracking open the skull, and it worked for Freeman since he had no surgical training. Freeman traveled the United States, visiting mental institutions, performing lobotomies on an assembly line, documenting it all with photographs. The majority of his patients were women and/or gay people and—in one case—a four-year-old child. Eventually his services were no longer needed, as lobotomies were phased out, replaced by more humane treatment with drugs and psychotherapy. 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. Wallace Fiennes.

This is young Tye Sheridan's second collaboration with Alverson, and he is also listed as an Executive Producer. 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. Andy is a silent presence, slouching on the edge of the rink, watching the girls in their grey skirts twirl and jump. He wanders through the bowels of the building, smoking, staring into space. His heavy woolen jacket, baggy trousers, boots, all emanate a kind of working-class 1950s aesthetic, no color brighter than a dull green. (Elizabeth Warn's work as costume designer is brilliant throughout.) Sheridan has barely 20 lines through the whole film. Andy is a teenager, but he is weighed down by anxiety, tormented by the absence of his mother. Long ago, she was put into an institution and Andy never learned her fate. After Andy's father dies, Dr. 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. Andy has ulterior motives for going along. He hopes to find out what happened to his mother. Turns out, the answer might be more than he can handle. 

The road trip that follows is filled with a quiet menace difficult to describe, but Alverson's control over the images is total. The scenes operate almost like tableaux, people frozen in space, in time, but frozen in anguished mental states, similar to the photos Andy takes of Fiennes' patients, before and after the "procedure." People are traumatized beyond language, and Alverson—along with cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman, who also shot "Entertainment"—captures frozen trauma in the silences, colors, vistas. Nothing is welcoming, there's no "give" anywhere. 

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