Northfork - Stephen Mason

            Northfork, written and directed by the Polish brothers, follows the story of the town of Northfork, Montana as it is being prepared for a new dam to be built. Because of the fact that the dam will cause the entire town to be flooded, people are sent into the town in order to make sure that everyone leaves there residences and are relocated. A father and son team that are working for the company that is overseeing the evictions are the two major characters in the movie who are working towards acquiring enough evictions so that they can be given a parcel of land on the banks of the new lake that will be created. The two characters are at odds with one another over whether to exhume the mother from her grave, which the father believes is necessary, and the son who believes that his mother’s grave should not be disturbed. Along with these two main characters, there is also a subplot in the movie that involves a sick child named Irwin who is being cared for by the pastor who is one of the last remaining residents of the town. While Irwin is in his bed he has dreams in which he meets an odd assortment of angels, who choose him as the unknown angel and take him away in an airplane in the end of the movie.

             I actually really enjoyed this movie a lot, even though at times it was hard to follow because of how weird some of the elements of the movie were. I really liked the way that the director incorporated the elements from the kid’s nightstand into the angels that he saw in his dreams. This is actually one of the first times I had actually noticed the motif in the movie before we talked about it, so I was pretty proud of myself. Although the scenes with the angels were definitely pretty weird, I felt that it made sense considering that they were coming from the mind of the kid, rather than representing people in real life. The scene with the snow in the abandoned house that was split in two that the father and son team went into was really well done and definitely showed the disconnect between what the father and son wanted for the dead mother.