I love a good suspense thriller set in a cold environment. Films like Fargo, Misery, and Wind River are some of my favorites. The latest is Dead of Winter starring Academy Award winning actress Emma Thompson. She is almost unrecognizable in the role. Covered in winter clothes and showing her age of 66, she looks like someone other than herself. She still holds her own, though against a couple of would-be kidnappers. 

Barb (Emma Thompson) is a grieving widow living in Minnesota.  She owned a bait and tackle shop with her husband before he passed away. As a ritual, they used to do some ice fishing, so she chose to continue the long tradition. She heads to Lake Hildar. She gets a bit lost and has to stop off and ask for directions. She ends up at a house with a strange bearded man with sunglasses played by Marc Manchaca. He gives her directions, but once she’s there, she notices gunshots in the distance and a young girl running away from the man she talked to not long before. She then realizes there is more going on with this man and the house she was at than meets the eye. 

Thompson is known primarily for her British humor and the period piece films she starred in thirty years ago. She is a great actress. I don’t have any hesitation saying that. Like all older actresses, she had trouble finding roles that fit her stature. There aren’t any British period pieces starring roles for women like her anymore. All those are going to a much younger demographic now. She has to make due with the occasional quirky character in the Harry Potter Franchise or a voice-over narration of a rom com. This role is a rarity for her these days. Even with a gravely voice and emotional breakdowns, she gives a decent performance. I’d be down for her to keep working even if it’s in movies like this.

The two would-be kidnappers are played as mentioned by Menchaca and Judy Greer as his wife. Another actress searching for good roles despite her career seemingly passing her by. She also has been playing little cameo roles in films like The Long Walk or bit parts in horror films. This is a better role for her than most she’s gotten in recent years. Her character has a motivation for why she kidnapped the young girl. It just wasn’t very interesting to me. When the revelation of why she’s doing all this, it is  just an okay moment. It’s kind of not worth the time I spent watching this movie.

There are a lot of action sequences in the film. Various scenes are shot, no pun intended, where the Greer and Menchaca characters are chasing after or shooting towards the Thompson character. The Menchaca character takes the brunt of the punishment from the Thompson character, though. He, like most henchmen in movies of this nature, ends up meeting his demise in a painful way. The key action sequence in the film takes place on a frozen lake, though. And it’s quite brutal, bloody, and gruesome. As I mentioned, all of this was kind of motivated by something kind of ridiculous, really.

A key element to the story is flashbacks via the memory of the Thompson character. Throughout the movie, viewers get to see who this woman was, what made her happy, and what made her sad. Her backstory was played by a different actress, Gaia Wise, but she had an uncanny resemblance to Thompson because she was Thompson’s actual daughter. That’s that great casting machine in Hollywood. They always cast the right actors for these roles. I was touched by these scenes. They gave me more reason to care about this character in the main story. Also, why she wanted to help this kidnapping victim. 

One element I noticed about this film from the very get-go was the score by Academy Award winning composer Volker Bertlemann. He won his Oscar for All Quiet on the Western Front 2023. He has since done another Academy Award nominated score for Conclave, also with Edward Berger on that film. This is a haunting score that matches the cold climate of the setting that the movie takes place in. It may, in fact, be my favorite part of this cold suspense thriller. I was chilled to the bone while listening to this music throughout the hrs 40-minute runtime of this picture.

Dead of Winter was trying to be this serious suspense thriller set in a cold climate like Minnesota, but it felt a bit incomplete to me. Even though there were flashbacks, they ultimately didn’t help the movie in any way. Thompson,  Greer, and Menchaca all give decent performances even though they can’t save this movie. It doesn’t have the intensity that it needed to be a film set in this genre. Sure, there was some violence and blood, and the cold weather got to the characters as well as myself. It just didn’t have enough tension that I had hoped it would have. Despite the cold and haunting score by Bertlemann. This was just a hoe hum kind of movie for me.

2 /1/2

Dan Skip Allen