Was Fargo really so long ago? Yes. Yes, it was. It’s about time we had another frozen wasteland thriller. I suppose we’ve had a few since then, but none quite like Dead of Winter.
The setting is key here. It is the Dead of Winter in northern Minnesota. It’s the part of Minnesota that even Minnesotans find remote. It is at least two hours from a town in any direction. The landscape is white and grey … unless you’re lost in the trees (a distinct possibility). Then it is white and brown. In the summer, there’s more green. This ain’t the summer.
Barb (Emma Thompson, who resembles a saddle bag in this film and sports a Minnesota accent) is hardly city folk, but she doesn’t know the area, either. She lives alone. Her husband died recently. She’s come to bury his ashes in Lake Hilda, the site of their first date. The lake has frozen over and she can walk upon it, even drive upon it, unmolested. There’s nobody here.
Or is there?
While checking the truck by the lake for supplies, Barb spies a girl with tied hands trying to flee an older man. The older man has a gun; he is not afraid to use it. He collects the girl and heads back into the woods that surround the lake. Barb investigates, tailing them back to his cabin where the girl is tied up and locked in the basement. The man (Marc Menchaca) yields to a woman (Judy Greer) shortly arrived at the cabin. Barb overhears talk of them killing the girl in the basement. And the killing is going to take place real soon.
Uh oh.
The smart play here is to flee, of course. The kidnapping couple hasn’t seen Barb yet. She could get away easy and nobody is the wiser. Trust and ignorance weigh on her decision. She has to know the couple is well armed. Yet there’s also the part where her conscience won’t let her abandon the hostage. Damn conscience.
This is quite the old fashioned thriller, huh? Two armed people. One hostage. One hero, unarmed. One girl to rescue. Transportation options limited. Communications
very limited. Help options: Non-existent. And the timing? Only as long as the sun stays up in a northern Minnesota winter … so, what? 45 minutes?
While Dead of Winter remained thrilling, I did get lost trying to figure out exactly what the couple wanted to do with their hostage. After seeing the entirety of the film, it still doesn’t make much sense to me. The evil plan is more than a little crackpot. Yet along with a tense thriller, there’s a bittersweet question: Does loneliness affect courage? In other words, do you think Barb goes all-in on a rescue if her husband is still alive? Of course, the only reason she’s there in the first place is because he is not. This is a reasonable thriller and one where you’ll constantly ask yourself how you rescue the girl. There are, I’m guessing, maybe a dozen right answers and maybe a hundred wrong ones. Let’s hope Barb chooses correctly.
A woman, whose husband had died
Returned to where the knot they had tied
Encountered a stranger
In nothing but danger
Helpless in all directions far and wide
Rated R, 98 Minutes
Director: Brian Kirk
Writer: Nicholas Jacobson-Larson, Dalton Leeb
Genre: The fucked-up things that happen in the survival world
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Who likes a good old-fashioned thriller?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Libertarians?
