The film follows the lives of Roman and Lucy, two people living difficult lives in a small, frozen town in the Arctic circle. However, even the icy expanses of the Arctic offer little refuge from their pasts.
The beauty and absurdity (things also get harrowing) don't entirely compensate for the overheated romanticism in which the movie is grounded, but they do make "Two Lovers and a Bear" a nearly singular cinematic trek.
Two Lovers and a Bear is preposterous and too infatuated with itself, but between its appealing leads and a surplus of other pleasures -- the super-crisp imagining of the Nunavut community of Apex, for one -- it's also pretty hard to resist.
Maslany is adept at playing haunted characters, and her Lucy is no exception. She and Roman build a life together outside of logic and the boundaries of human habitation. They are a match made in a frozen heaven.
Beautiful and thoroughly unpredictable; you never know where Nguyen is going with this story, including the chilling, sci-fi/horror direction he heads in toward the film's climax.
There's a surreal quality to Two Lovers and a Bear that gets underlined by the appearance of the Ursus maritimus of the title; DeHaan has called the movie an adult fairy tale, and that's an apt description.
Raw, heartfelt, well-acted and exhilarating. A refreshingly unpredictable, imaginative, and un-Hollywood film that has just the right balance of truth and spectacle.
