Brotherhood

Brotherhood is a 2019 Canadian period drama film written and directed by Richard Bell. Set in the 1920s, the film recounts the true story of a group of youth at a summer camp on Balsam Lake in the Kawartha Lakes, who had to fight for survival when an unforeseen thunderstorm overwhelmed their canoe trip. The film's cast includes Brendan Fehr, Brendan Fletcher, Jake Manley, Gage Munroe and Dylan Everett. Plot In the opening scenes, Arthur Lambden, packs a photo of his son in his backpack and meets the young members of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, and their leader, Robert Butcher, on the path to Long Point, a camp on the shores of Balsam Lake in the Kawartha Lakes, which is located 145 kilometres northeast of Toronto. Both Butcher, who is the camp leader and Lambden, who is second in command, are veterans of World War I. Butcher tells Lambden that, while it was his first time operating a camping trip at Long Point, the group had camped at Clear Lake for many years. He told Lambden that the youth—whose fathers had died in the war or in the Spanish flu pandemic that followed the war—would benefit from being in the rugged outdoors. Butcher is concerned that the boys of the generation that succeeded their own, were being, "feminized by their mothers and teachers." They begin their canoe trip late in the evening, and when their 30-foot war canoe is capsized during a sudden summer squall, drowning some, those that did survive spend the night in the frigid, dark lake waters clinging to the overturned canoe that is slowly sinking. The film flashes between scenes of the survivors struggling to ward off the freezing cold and fighting fatigue—hypothermia—and their fears, with lively, happy camp scenes earlier in the evening of the boys engaging in camping activities designed for male bonding, creating a "band of brothers". The movie focuses on the individual lives of some of the characters before the camping trip. George Waller played by Jake Manley, had an abusive father; Arthur Lambden, played by Brendan Fletcher, had survived the front lines in World War I only to return home as a carrier of the Spanish flu virus that killed his own wife and child; the two brothers—Will played by Sam Ashe Arnold and Jack played by Gage Munroe, whose father had been killed during the war; and Leonard, played by Matthew Isen, whose father had drowned years before the camping trip and who feared water.