-By Bernard Besserglik

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Pollution is bad for you. Mercury kills. When villagers in the Peruvian Andes living near a mine prone to mercury spills start developing headaches, going blind and dying off, it doesn't take rocket science to work out what's going on. So when halfway through Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's second feature, Altiplano, an eye specialist intones wonderingly, "There's something wrong," the audience may be inclined to snigger. But the audience may already have switched off by then.

Altiplano is structured around the stories of two wholly dissimilar women: Grace, a disillusioned war photographer whose husband, Max, a surgeon specializing in removing cataracts, has gone off to work among the South American Indians, and Saturnina, a young Indian woman who has just become engaged. Saturnina's fiancé Ignacio sets off on a journey up the mountainside to seek the "magic water" he needs for the wedding ceremony but dies as a result of mercury contamination.

Angered by what they perceive as the failure of science to cure their ailments, the villagers turn against the specialists at the eye clinic, and Max is killed in the ensuing ruckus. Grace travels to the village to find out what has happened, but her path never crosses that of Saturnina, who takes drastic measures of her own.

It is hard to tell at which audience the directing team is aiming. The ecology message is too obvious and too un-contentious to be worth stating. Brosens & Woodworth (they like ampersands and prefer to eschew first names in the directorial credit) describe their work as "spiritual" cinema (the quotes are their own). The spiritual content, however, fails to rise above the clichéd level of finding mystery in everything and placing nature on a pedestal.

The movie is self-consciously artsy, and too often the spectator senses the filmmakers striving after effect, whether through circular pans, black-and-white sequences, posed compositions, dummy figures posted in the landscape or the frequent use of masks. The characterization is thin and dialogue tends to be leaden.

What's to admire? The Andean landscapes are breathtaking in Francisco Gózon's cinematography, and Magaly Solier—who starred in the Berlinale’s Golden Bear-winning The Milk of Sorrow—emotes over and above the call of duty as Saturnina. Taken individually, some of Brosens & Woodworth’s effects are indeed striking, but the overall impression is one of overblown platitude.
-The Hollywood Reporter