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‘Mountains’ Review: Miami Gentrification Drama Starts as Slice-of-Life but Grows Stilted
Monica Sorelle's debut, which played Tribeca and the Toronto Film Festival, follows a Haitian American tasked with bulldozing neighboring houses.
Filmmaker Monica Sorelle looks to explain how that bitter pill gets swallowed in her debut feature “ Mountains,” which follows Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a blue-collar Haitian American who becomes complicit in gentrifying his own neighborhood. While his parents chat in Haitian Creole, Junior mostly speaks English, especially when he’s brushing off explaining why he keeps leaving the house during dinner time — a source of increasing anxiety and disappointment for his father. Whether he’s mediating a fight between a coworker and a racist nepo hire or demanding his college-dropout son stay home for dinner, Xavier seems compelled to maintain status quo across his life, under the impression that trusting the process will serve him in the end.
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