Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: Dead of Winter

In the past few weeks, we saw Spinal Tap: The End Conitnues, which was quite good. (In a world of pathetic, warmed-over moribund properties, this is a hilarious, pathetic warmed-over moribund property.) We also saw Riefenstahl, which is interesting but ultimately kind of gormless with some terrific close-up film of the '36 Olympics.

We also saw The Long Walk, based on a Stephen King novel, and so I figured you might enjoy a review of a movie weighted down by its own stupidity. But that turned out to be a spoiler-laden 3,000 words.

Then we saw Chain Reactions, with a bunch of old lefties reflecting on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and that turned out to be 2,000 words.

Fortunately, then we saw a good movie, which was easy to sum up in less than 1,000 non-spoiler-y words. And so I present:

Dead of Winter

"Emma Thompson is the love child of Marge Gunderson and Rambo" is your high concept take on Dead of Winter, the new thriller from Brian Kirk (best known as a director on "Game Of Thrones" and "Penny Dreadful") working off a script by composer Nicholas Jacob-Larson and actor Dalton Leeb.

Seriously, this screenplay is the only one either has to their credit.

The story is simple, but not shallow: Barb (Thompson) has come out to a remote lake in northern Minnesota for some reason, and getting a bit lost along the way she stops at a cabin where she interrupts Camo Jacket (Marc Menchaca, "Ozark", "Generation Kill") in the midst of his wood gathering.

Yeah, he has no name. The cast of ten has only five characters with names. This is an interesting kind of economy—you don't really notice it when people don't have names, but you really notice it when they do. Barb, as it turns out, is a widow, and one of the people who has a name is her late husband "Karl".

Anyway, she interrupts Camo Jacket and notices a little blood on the ground, and that he's a little awkward. But he points her to the lake and off she goes.

While she's off at the lake, we see her fishing, and clutching a tackle box like it's her most prized possession. She gets her truck stuck in the snow and while she's trying to get it out, we see Camo Guy chasing a young, bound girl, and dragging her back.

And that's the opening.

Ooh, yer gonna wanna put some "Bactine" on that.

Oh, Yah? Sorry!

Politeness, paranoia, maintaining a demeanor or semblance of humanity in the face of savagery—it's all grist for Emma Thompson's Oscar-worthy performance as Barb. She just vanishes into the role. I can almost guarantee The Boy doesn't even know she has an English accent. And her Minnesotan isn't as broad as Frances McDormand's in Fargo. (Not once does she say "Oh, yah?". There are a lot of "soh-ree"s, of course.)

Her antagonist, the Purple Lady, is played by Judy Greer (just seen in The Long Walk), who makes the perfect anti-Barb: This is a story about how far you would go to survive. Barb is driven by a desire to save Leah, the kidnapped girl (Laurel Marsden). She endures incredible pain and hardship to do this (and to keep herself alive), while Leah's drive to survive seems to have emerged only with her kidnapping.

Purple Lady's drive to survive completely consumes her and her husband, Camo Jacket.

I'm just gonna run out and get you some pants.

In flashbacks we see young Barb (Gaia Wise, Thompson's real-life daughter) and Karl (Cúán Hosty-Blaney), on their first date, at their engagement, at their attempt to have children and finally Karl's end.

In a lot of horror movies, which this sort of is, the question of how deep to make the characters is answered with "saucer deep".

But! It can actually be worse to get a lot of backstory. "Here's ten minutes on this character's lifelong dream to be an arti—and she's dead." It can feel like padding or a cheap sentimentality. I was slightly concerned that might be the case here, and we don't really need much to support Barb. Thompson gets our support for free, really.

Here, every little bit of backstory ties in to a part of the current-day action. The fishing box, the lake itself, a wedding band, even the hostage herself, all feed back at critical times.

How To Make A Movie

The acting is top-notch, too, as mentioned. (At one point, though, I half expected to hear Greer yell "You're not my supervisor!", so attuned to her voice acting work am I.)

The direction is good. The editing is good. The camerawork—

OK, here's the thing: I love snow-based movies, just for the snow. A Simple Plan, for example, was a book I hated but I watched the movie every time I'd come across it on cable (back when I had that) because I love the stark white and the contrast with the black. (And the movie fixes the book's excesses, at least closer to my taste.)

Would you buy a used, blood-covered rifle from this man?

I missed that sharpness here, which may be an issue with digital video or it may be just a contemporary choice. That aside, it's very good camerawork, and there's one particular shot from a basement looking up through a pair of storm doors that really struck me as something I'd never seen in a movie shot on film. I've seen similar shots, but they never integrated the two levels of lighting as well. It may not even be possible on film, or so hard or expensive that you wouldn't try it.

The music is so good, you won't notice it. It's working its magic behind the level of conscious awareness.

In short: It's a good movie. The Boy said "Good. Not perfect but good."

There is one gag with the tackle box that struck us both as impossible, but we also both knew it was going to happen, and I thought it worked from a narrative/thematic POV, even if it couldn't have actually happened. (Since I used a similar gag in my book Silk Unspun, and precisely because of the thematic value, I can't complain too much about it here.) The characters do some dumb stuff, as is usual for horror/thriller, but most of it works as "dumb things you might actually do in that situation."

When we saw it, it had a shockingly low 6.5 on IMDB. It's crept up to 6.7 since then. I would, personally, put it in the 7s, and will consider myself lucky to see another thriller as good this year.

I said YOU'RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR!

posted by Open Blogger at 08:30 PM

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