Summary
A taciturn cartographer, hired to chart a barely scrawled alpine frontier, treks upward with a mule, a cracked sextant, and a notebook bound in sealskin. Frostbite, avalanches, and the slow erosion of his own memories become the film’s only recurring characters; human dialogue is as rare as oxygen. Each ridge he crests reveals another strata of grief—his dead wife’s silhouette in drifting snow, his estranged son’s laughter echoing inside a crevasse—until cartography mutates into autobiography. Mid-picture he discovers an abandoned mining settlement where kerosene lamps still flicker, as though time itself has lingered to gossip about the foolishness of men who believe they can own a mountain. In the final reel the camera refuses the comfort of arrival: no flag is planted, no panorama triumphantly unveiled; instead the surveyor simply releases his pencil into a white abyss and keeps walking, map unfinished, identity dissolving into altitude. The closing shot—seven motionless minutes of an icy shelf breathing under dawn—turns the viewer’s own pulse into a reluctant metronome, an audible reminder that wilderness is not backdrop but prosecutor.
