DEAD OF WINTER

TWO STARS Barb becomes enmeshed in saving the life of a young woman, kidnapped in the frozen, winter landscape of Minnesota.

DRAMA US English #DEADOFWINTER Starring Emma Thompson, Judy Greer

This is the sort of film that confirms just how rough the landscape must be for actors of Emma Thompson’s calibre. A hackneyed horror-thriller with pretensions of grit (one she, surprisingly, co-produced presumably because this is how you get to work), DEAD OF WINTER wastes its star on a story that mistakes gore for tension and carnage for suspense.

Thompson plays a widowed Minnesotan whose flannel-and-fluff demeanour is so folksy and so FARGO-adjacent that it’s like Frances McDormand is about to pop up from behind a snowbank at any moment. In this frozen potboiler, Thompson is Barb, a woman driving across frozen backwoods to scatter her late husband’s ashes at their old fishing spot. An emotional gesture sure, but why she chooses to do this now, in a blizzard, in a truck held together by rust and optimism, in the dead of winter is anyone’s guess. 

Predictably, the truck dies and so Barb trudges through whiteout conditions seeking shelter, only to stumble upon a remote cabin where a kidnapped young woman, Leah (Laurel Marsden), is chained to a basement pipe by a pair of unhinged criminals (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca). Why? It's not well explained anymore than why Greer's character spends most of the film with needles stuck in her face. Best not to focus on that.

Thus begins our hero’s transformation from grieving fisherwoman into a down-home, must-do-what’s-right McGyver variant. It’s a decent premise in which an ordinary, kind-hearted woman is suddenly required to perform extraordinary acts of courage. But the film has no idea how to build on it. After a promising first act, the screenplay swerves off the road and crashes into an incoherent mess of half-baked concepts amplified by Brian Kirk’s confused direction: scenes sputter and tension evaporates faster than Barb’s body heat.

To hold our attention, Kirk substitutes tension with violence. Lots of it. The inherent threat of dangerous isolation, or the psychological tilt of the villains, even the claustrophobia of the winter landscape - any of this could have delivered real suspense. Instead, we’re given increasingly grotesque injuries, prolonged torture and an unwelcome volume of bloodletting. Thompson spends most of the film stitched, shot, slashed or frozen, quilting her own arm back together in scenes that provoke more winces than thrills. The violence is not only excessive, it’s unwarranted and short-circuits any emotional engagement the story might have mustered.

To their credit, Thompson and Greer almost save the day. Their scenes together hint at the richer film buried somewhere under the snowdrifts: two women navigating grief in radically different ways, forced into conflict by circumstance and desperation. But even they cannot overcome a narrative that doesn’t trust its own simplicity with an ending that’s pretty much bonkers.

DEAD OF WINTER should have been a taut, icy thriller. Instead, it’s a messy, overwrought slog. Two stars—both of them for the women who deserved better.

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