An unusual film about a healer and what it cost her to be one, set in Canada's far north. The three adult principals are flawless. The two child actors are flawless too. If nothing else it's worth seeing these performances which should impress even the most hard-hearted of critics.The story itself is rather slight. A woman is recognized as having the gift by another healer but her own family problems might not withstand her acceptance of her gift. Aside from that it's about relationships between a mother and her two sons, and perhaps also about a loving mother trying to live mostly through her emotions.The real value of the film is how it seems to represent a breakthrough for all of the actors involved. Cillian Murphy, Jennifer Connelly, and Melanie Laurent are all unforgettably good. The two McGrath brothers are irreplaceable.

The acting is fine, Jennifer Connelly is always good as is Cillian Murphy and the kid-actors were fine as well.Visually it's also a nice looking movie, with limited colours that creates and cold and melancholic feeling which suits the movie just fine, because it is rather melancholic.The movie though is just good enough not to be bad, but far from great.Needless to say Jennifer Connelly's character is very spiritual and believes in healing, I believe her character is supposed to be Native American although I am not quite sure about this but a lot of her spiritual beliefs stem from them if nothing else.So it helps if you have some sort of interest in that or at least an open mind because it's not always very up front and direct in it's approach to tell the story with plenty of metaphors and subtlety more so than direct big orchestrated dramatic scenes.The blu-ray version (at least the one I watched could possibly differ in some countries) is 97 minutes, and not 112 minutes like it says on IMDb.From what I've heard the version shown on festivals was indeed 112 minutes but it wasn't received that well so they cut it down to 97 minutes for the blu-ray/DVD market.And although that caught me off guard initially, I'm not quite sure if it would be able to sustain my interest for 112 minutes so this could be one of those times where the cut down version is actually better, although I of course can't be sure about this.

I know that Jennifer likes to do unusual movies but this one is her worst choice ever ! My Five First Minutes rule has been right : here, you understand nothing, the place, the characters and you are greatly annoyed by this spoiled brat with the falcon ! So the entire movie is like this : scenes drags painfully to say little, nothing is explained or makes sense, the characters are empty or boring, those cold winter locations are everything but poetic (prefer « Fargo »), Murphy brings his usual lack of charisma, the editing is salvaged by stupid flashbacks, proof that this writer/director can't tell a story ! For one movie that was about hope in distress, my watching was very painful, so much i have to fast forward it with absolutely no surprises, no emotion ! Just awful !

An hour and a half into the movie and I am still not entirely sure what is happening. Seriously what the heck am I watching? Terrible movie. Jumps back and forth between the past and future at unrelated points in the story. Dialog is boring. Hard to follow what is going on. Character development is non-existent. The mother discovers she is a mystic healer. The son keeps and trains and keeps predator birds (falcons specifically). The execution of the premise is even more weird and poorly executed than it sounds. This is a really poorly developed story that never should have been made into a movie. Through its entirety the viewer is subjected to bad writing (no range in vocabulary) with a plot that never really happens. The attempt is to masquerade as some deep art piece. It fails. Film was just a crap indie film or a B-Role movie intended to go straight to RedBox. And even it that low bar to shoot for, if the directors hadn't scored Jennifer Connelly in the lead role it wouldn't have even attracted viewership in that subprime outlet. This movie totally relies on viewer recognizing the star on the DVD cover to entice giving the movie a chance. Its not worth the buck you feed into a Redbox machine to rent it. AVOID and spend the hour and a half of your like doing something more worthwhile like try watching paint dry.