Like almost every other actor of renown in today’s diminished world of second-rate movies, Emma Thompson is forced to face the challenge of inventing her own projects to keep her film career alive. This now includes starring in a hackneyed, uninspired dime-a-dozen horror film called Dead of Winter. She also produced it herself. Times are bad all over.
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DEAD OF WINTER ★★ (2/4 stars) |
In this waste of a great actor’s talent and intelligence, she plays an aging, gun-toting hag unwisely revisiting an old fishing hole her late husband loved to spread his ashes. On a snowy road in the frozen wastes of northern Minnesota, her truck breaks down in a storm and when she hikes through drifts of ice up to her eyeballs seeking warmth and shelter in an abandoned shack in the wilderness, she finds a young kidnap victim handcuffed to a frozen basement pipe by a pair of married of demented killers (Judy Greer, especially menacing as the wacko wife) for reasons that are never convincingly explained. The movie is about the old woman’s futile efforts to save the girl from an endless series of assaults and tortures, narrowly escaping near death at every turn. It’s a preposterous story to follow, but thanks to the expertise of Emma Thompson, it keeps you interested.
Shot, slashed, bleeding, and half frozen to death, she copes remarkably well, fortified by memories of her happy marriage and her ability to keep a fire going in a deserted cabin, medicate her gunshot wounds and sew the pieces of her arm together (“Just like sewing a quilt,” she quips through the pain.) The white backdrop of constant snow and zero temperatures also add to the intensity of the winter ambience with enough discomfort that your teeth will chatter just looking at it. The movie is a far cry from the star’s collection of elegant Jane Austen period pieces, but Ms. Thompson is always worth watching, even when she’s wasting her time—and ours.
Unfortunately, the sloppy screenplay by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb asks more questions than it answers, deriving most of its style from Fargo. Knowing the territory, why did Ms. Thonpson’s character choose the Midwest’s worst season to spread ashes from a dilapidated truck not safe to drive, even in the best weather? What did the kidnap victim do to get captured? Where are the vicious kidnappers going, and why? Director Brian Kirk does nothing to explain, elaborate or justify. Worse still, the two lunatic villains are identified as fentanyl addicts, but that doesn’t explain why the female half of the team goes through most of the movie with as many as five hypodermic needles at a time lodged in her tongue.
What attracted such a fine actress as Emma Thompson to so much carnage in the first place is anybody’s guess. According to the end credits, Dead of Winter is set in Minnesota but filmed on location in Finland, Germany and Belgium, when all it takes is one snow-covered backyard in New Jersey.