More times than I can count, I have thanked the movie gods for Jeff Goldblum, whose lanky, often loquacious presence can lighten almost any project. Even so, he has his work cut out in “The Mountain,” Rick Alverson’s ferociously controlled, adamantly depressive story of a 1950s road trip taken by Andy (Tye Sheridan), a recently bereaved young man, and Dr. Wallace Fiennes (Goldblum), the itinerant psychiatrist who befriends him.

Fiennes, a genial freelance lobotomist, might not be the healthiest companion for the troubled Andy, whose mother has long been institutionalized. Virtually orphaned when his domineering father (a grouchy Udo Kier) keels over while teaching a figure-skating class, Andy moves like someone carrying an unbearable weight. Glum and brooding, he barely reacts when Fiennes hands him a camera and invites him on an asylum tour to photograph the patients who will undergo Fiennes’s soon-to-be-discredited surgery.

As the trip progresses, Andy begins to connect with these lost souls. The pale, docile women seated on hospital beds, legs dangling and eyes vacant, look strangely alike, their common illness erasing their individuality. These bleached, oppressively sterile scenes have a peculiar, anesthetized beauty; yet they infuse the film with a hopelessness that’s barely relieved on the leafy drives between appointments, and in the bars and bowling alley where Fiennes relaxes by fondling random women. Goldblum might be uncharacteristically low-key here, but without him this picture would at times feel unbearable.