The rugged mountain scenery of Montana is as much a character in this film as the three generations of men the story revolves around.
Teenage boy, David (Josh Wiggins), is sent to visit his father for the school holidays. The dad, Cal (Matt Bomer), is a hardcore outdoorsman and a tough love teacher. His intention is to turn his soft city son into a hunter, just like his father before him.
Heading up the mountain to hunt grouse and moose, the pair struggle to connect. Cal is a loner - albeit an impossibly handsome one - and David is a goofy teenager who is torn between wanting to live up to his father’s expectations and the desire to home to his normal, suburban life in Texas.
A series of hunting missions sees David grow in confidence and become intrigued by his father’s world. Cal’s lessons about survival start to hit the mark, and a tentative bond starts to form as the two generations rough it in a tiny cabin and share evenings around the fire.
Set against the epic backdrop of the Montana landscape, the closeness the men begin to feel is in sharp parallel to the vastness of the environment they find themselves in.
Throughout the film, a series of flashbacks to Cal’s coming of age on the mountain with his late father, played by Bill Pullman, shifts the story between the past and the present, and gives the story a sentimental element that is overdone.
With themes of survival, masculinity, hunting versus killing for sport, and man against nature, Walking Out lags at times due to the meandering plot.
A dramatic event that happens in the latter part of the film is where things pick up, and from there the viewer’s engagement intensifies.
Part lamentation, part poetry, and part wilderness survival film, the real highlight of Walking Out is firstly, the scenery, and secondly, the last quarter of the story when the focus of the film shifts to something other than father and son dynamics.
Walking Out opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday April 5th.