From the freezing heart of Fargo country in snowy Minnesota comes a quite outrageously enjoyable suspense thriller starring Emma Thompson; I hadn’t realised what a treat it would be to see Thompson handle a pistol with a scope and also demonstrate where on the body you can get shot and still keep moving.
The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre. Brian Kirk directs from a script by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, and Thompson turns up the accent dial to play a neighbourly and good-natured Minnesota widow. With her recently deceased husband, she ran a fishing supplies store and like him was keen on ice-fishing: venturing out on huge freezing lakes, drilling a hole in the ice, setting up a phone-box sized ice shelter for warmth and lowering the bait and lure. Her late husband sweetly took her on an ice-fishing trip on a certain remote lake for their first date – bittersweet flashbacks bring home the memory – and it is to this lake that she comes on a mission to scatter his ashes.
Having not quite arrived at this beautiful but subzero spot that she hasn’t visited for some years and got a bit lost, Thompson finds herself pulling in to a very strange property to ask directions; she hears disquieting sounds from the interior and sees a peculiar man (Marc Menchaca) chopping wood in front of a sickeningly vivid splash of blood on the snow. The man curtly explains, in response to her tactless inquiry, that this is due to “a deer” and tells her where to find her lake. But it is only on leaving him that Thompson is to discover the awful truth: this man is keeping a teenage girl (Laurel Marsden) prisoner and apparently intending to kill her. Thompson is also to come across the man’s even scarier wife, played by Judy Greer.
So has Thompson’s widow chanced upon the local equivalent of psycho hillbillies? Is this to be The Minnesota Chain Saw Massacre? Or perhaps The Minnesota Ice Drill Massacre? In fact, these people’s personalities and motivations are more complicated. Thompson’s character also has more to show us: she is a tough, resourceful woman used to the outdoors, used to the extreme cold, scared but not utterly discomposed at the sound of gunshots, and armed with a sense that, in an extreme situation, she might have less to lose than these people. And she also has a touch of ruthlessness: she knows how to trap people, how to use the lethal cold against them.
The story rattles along, entertaining and alarming, until it reaches its guignol horror on the ice. Thompson’s relatable presence and likability-aura make a very good solvent for the concentrated nastiness of Greer’s desperate villain and what she has in mind for her teen prisoner. There’s a distinct chill.
• The Dead of Winter screened at the Locarno film festival.
