Review by C.J. Bunce

When you hear Emma Thompson and horror movie you should immediately think of the masterpiece Dead Again, where Thompson starred opposite Kenneth Branagh in a time shifting mystery of lovers whose lives were upended by murder.  Thirty-five years later she’s back to horror in Dead of Winter, an odd, uneven genre-bender that has its moments.  Thompson plays much older as a recent widow named Barb, embarking in mid-winter to Minnesota to scatter her husband’s ashes on a frozen lake where they first met.  The movie co-stars Thompson’s daughter Gaia Wise (All Creatures Great and Small) as a younger version of Barb, and Judy Grier (Ant-Man) as a woman Thompson’s character inadvertently encounters in the woods in your typical “wrong place at the wrong time” trope.  The main problem is the movie tonally struggles with being a B-horror movie with a script not up to the calibre of the cast.

Call it polar noir or Nordic noir, mysteries and psychological thrillers set in the frozen tundra have been around forever.  And the “wrong place at the wrong time” trope is exactly the backbone of the plot–what little there is.  Dead of Winter isn’t exactly The Shining, but it has the crazed psychopathic killer, the remote setting, and the snowbound victims.  Beyond that, less is clear.  Not only is this a dark story, it’s a depressing story about depressing characters.  Thompson’s heroine seems to have abandoned her existence, making nothing but unwise decisions.  Greer’s character is dying of some disease, which at first seems part of the mystery, but by the end viewers will see they never learn exactly why she thinks she can kidnap a young woman and cut out some organ and hope that some doctor in a town hours away will simply stitch it into her to save her own life.

Greer’s character’s husband is played by The Outsider’s Marc Menchaka, who kidnaps a young woman, but soon realizes that his crazy wife’s plan is both stupid and enough to leave her for.  The kidnap victim is played by Ms. Marvel’s Laurel Marsden.  All we learn about her is that Greer’s character thinks she has nothing to live for and is somehow going to die anyway–so she is a prime candidate to unwillingly sacrifice one of her organs.

Typical of this chilly genre is slow action.  It’s hard to imagine most viewers would sit through this if it didn’t feature Emma Thompson, whose sporadic bits of dialogue show a glimpse of a Minnesota accent.  She’s the latest addition to production studios flipping the traditional Old Man roles in the action sphere to women, following Jamie Lee Curtis (64) in the recent Halloween trilogy, Linda Hamilton (63) in Terminator: Dark Fate, and Jodie Foster (62) in True Detective: Night Country (Thompson is the oldest at 66).

Something about the vibe will keep your attention, especially one key scene where Barb sets a trap, causing Menchaka’s character to submerge into the middle of the lake.  But as much as Barb is a badass, she’s also daft, and when she has the chance to kill the bad guys she’s either not adept or… too nice?  Fortunately for anyone sticking around, the momentum builds into a face-off not unlike Thompson’s face-off with Derek Jacobi in Dead Again.  And if you’re enjoying the movie as a B-level horror flick, then you won’t be surprised or disappointed with the ending, even if it comes as no surprise.

The reason to watch the movie is Thompson and daughter Gaia Wise as her younger self.  It calls back to all the movies Thompson acted in with her own mother, actress Phyllida Law.  In fact if you search Thompson, Wise, and Law, you’re likely to find photos of young Law and Thompson that so closely match Wise you probably can’t tell them apart.  For future movie-going audiences this foretells something promising, because it means more of this cinema family legacy can continue into the future via Wise, who is just at the beginning of her acting career.

You’d probably expect something more from The Day of the Jackal, Luther, and The Riches’ Brian Kirk as director, but if you’re in the middle of winter and a glutton for punishment, or you’re in the middle of summer wanting to cool off, Dead of Winter is a better use of your time than Mads Mikkelsen’s Polar, and probably on par with Liam Neeson’s Cold Pursuit and The Ice Road.

Filmed in Finland instead of Minnesota, with a 1970s Ford pickup truck and a Chevy El Camino, Dead of Winter is now streaming on HBO Max.

C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg