Staff Pick Premiere: A witty short about losing your wits

Sam Morrill

From the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, to the submarine in Das Boot and the jury room in 12 Angry Men, confinement has driven many to the outskirts of sanity in cinema. Couple this same sense of isolation with icy mountain air thin enough to leave even the most seasoned mountaineer gasping, and things really start to get interesting. Set on the side of a mountain in the middle of a blizzard, this week’s Staff Pick Premiere is a tightly spun and darkly comedic thriller about a team of mountaineers searching for a comrade who has disappeared into the night. Ultimately, “Mountain Fever” is a caustic warning about the mortal danger that can rapidly descend on all of us when we lose our senses.

The film was written and directed by German director, Frédéric Hambalek, who forthrightly admits to having no mountaineering experience. “A leisurely stroll, that’s my pace,” he explains. Though no daredevil himself, Hambalek may have channeled some of his characters’ madness during production, compelling his crew to lug “200 kg of artificial snow up a ski slope” while “throwing it into a industrial fan at below-zero at night.” This was all for the better — Hambalek’s gambit paid off. The result is a short that excels within its constraints to create implied scale, both physically and dramatically, that few shorts are able to achieve even when granting themselves more characters, locations or runtime.

Perhaps most impressive is Hambalek’s ability to nimbly traverse the ridge between comedy and drama. Throughout “Mountain Fever” the stakes remain high enough to keep the audience engaged, but never so high that the audience is unwilling to laugh at the characters’ inevitable misfortune. As Hambalek puts it: “observed from a distance, real-life drama can be quite funnny, in an absurd way.” After watching “Mountain Fever,” we think you’ll agree. We also think you may reconsider that camping trip you had been planning for the spring.Check out more of Vimeo’s Staff Pick Premieres here.

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