The Dyatlov Pass Incident is the kind of story that will keep breathlessly speculative true-crime documentaries spinning for years to increasingly limited returns. It contains just about everything a televisual “what if?” show requires to keep viewers engaged for an hour or so: a multitude of tragic victims, an intensely cinematic natural backdrop, a baffling patchwork of clues and evidence, and several possible solutions ranging from likely to absurd which people can choose between. But all the right ingredients do not always produce the best outcome, as Liam Le Guillou’s not quite ready for prime-time documentary “An Unknown Compelling Force” shows.
In January 1959, when the Soviet Union was busy waging proxy combat with the United States from Cuba to West Berlin, some people had different things on their minds. A group of nine students took off on a grueling expedition through the Ural Mountains that progressed from trains to trucks and eventually to cross-country skis. Diary entries and snapshots show a spirited band that looks thrilled to be goofing off while trekking through the pristine but frighteningly vast wilderness toward a place called Dead Mountain. After the expedition failed to check-in, rescue teams were sent out. They found all nine dead, having seemingly slashed their way out of their tent and wandered a mile away. The bodies showed signs of numerous blunt-force injuries and possibly even mutilation. Why did they leave their shelter without their winter gear in freezing temperatures? Was it fear? Madness? The official investigation ascribed the deaths to “an unknown compelling force.”
Like many others, Le Guillou does not see that as a, particularly satisfying answer. In the years since, an entire cottage industry has sprung up around the Dyatlov Pass Incident, with journalists, amateur sleuths, and (now quite aged) bereaved friends poring over the same baffling facts and trying to make some sense of them. The theories have ranged from the natural (avalanche) to manufactured (indigenous locals, known as Mansi, murdering them for desecrating holy land) to the out-there (UFOs, radiation, yetis, fuzzily-argued ideas about military tests and cover-ups). Le Guillou gamely checks off a number of these as he walks viewers through the event, laying out the knowns and unknowns with relative clarity and only lightly skimming the atmosphere of endemic Russian paranoia and cynicism that keeps new theories percolating. But disappointingly, despite the rich subject matter, Le Guillou lets “An Unknown Compelling Force” become more his story than that of the dead.
An awkward narrator and stiff on-camera presence, Le Guillou would have been better off keeping himself in the background and giving the film over to the experts. While few of them present compelling evidence of what did happen, the interviewees (ranging from a journalist, coroner, and somewhat somnolent FBI agent to a Mansi woman who vaguely remembers the incident from her childhood) at least provide a panoply of opinions. Despite his professed “obsession” with the case, Le Guillou ultimately has little to say on the facts of the matter. Instead, he tries to pair his own reporting journey, following the expedition’s path by going hundreds of kilometers deep into the still-remote Ural wilderness to that of his subjects. This is far less revelatory than he may think, given his propensity for pronounced lines like “if you want to get the real story, you have to get out and talk to people” and eye-rolling self-dramatics like “there’s no backing out now.”
Stitching all this together are the expedition’s photos and diary entries. Le Guillou correctly spends a lot of time poring over, less for clues than to present pictures of the dead as living, breathing people. There is something rare and heartbreaking about this aspect of the film. So much of what is seen in the West about life in the Soviet Union is about misery and oppression—“Chernobyl,” “Mr. Jones,” and “The Death of Stalin” is a representative sampling—and for good reasons. Just hearing the diaries from and seeing the snapshots of the giddy, grinning troupe serves as a potent reminder of how people figure out how to find joy even in the direst circumstances.
But even with that humanizing aspect, Le Guillou has still made a strangely passionless film about a truly mystifying event. [C]