Critics reviews

The American debut of Peruvian director Claudia Llosa is frustratingly stingy with the explanatory details, aiming for an abstruse approach that's more exasperating than mysterious. Gaps are filled in with vague suggestions of new-age mysticism and lots of portentous dialogue, and what results is a tepid, gray-white smudge of a movie, so fixated on offering a deep-freeze depiction of overwhelming emotional trauma that it remains hopelessly inert.

This real that is unreal is one that fails its own exigencies of logic; its form is dishonest, if not simply clumsy.

An overdramatic, sort of mystical melodrama, Aloft is probably Llosa's weakest films to date: Starring a wonderful cast (Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, Melanie Laurent), the film loses its course rapidly with a story devoid from Llosa's previously treatment of local rituals and bluff-like mystics. The actors do a amazing job trying to contain the massive amount of emotional overcharge in an already predictable plot.

Structurally the film is fine, Llosa skilfully moving between the two periods of time, between the reasons for Nana's disappearance and the present search for her. But having set up a tremendous maelstrom in the centre of the film, a heartrending guilt shared by a mother and son, Llosa sacrifices its potential to a denouement that buys into the psychobabble world of Connelly's healer.

Anyone who's seen Rivers and Tides (2001) is going to admire Andy Goldsworthy, but suppose, just suppose that his site-specific sculptures had healing powers. And suppose that the gift, the ability to create them, could be passed on. And suppose… or don't. Aloft lost me early on, but I stuck it out. Because I'm afraid it might win something.