Emma Thompson‘s palpable aura of capability and down-to-earth shrewdness has seldom been better deployed than in “The Dead of Winter.” Without the star channelling the blunt good sense and sing-song Minnesotan vowels of “Fargo’s” Marge Gunderson, Brian Kirk‘s midwestern midwinter thriller would amount to little more than an episode of “Criminal Minds” with a bigger landscape photography budget.
With her, however, the film just about performs against genre expectations regarding suspense and blood-in-the-snow violence, while also delivering a lesson in the potential for heroism of ordinary older women. Contrary to the impulse — in cinema and in the world — to ignore or at best wildly underestimate this cohort, “The Dead of Winter” regards the wisdom accrued by one such sixty-something, over the course of a decent life lived well and lovingly, as little short of a superpower.
In a Minnesota house blanketed in snow adjoining the bait-and-tackle store she runs, a widow (Thompson) mourns the recent passing of her beloved husband. She packs up her truck with ice fishing equipment and drives miles through spectacular frosted forests on the bittersweet mission of scattering his ashes, per his request, at the frozen lake on which, decades prior, they had their first date. A quirk of Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb’s screenplay is that the characters remain largely unnamed, so it’s a bit of a shock to discover late on that our resourceful heroine is in fact called Barb.
Barb stops for directions, at a cabin occupied by a well-wrapped-up, bearded gent (Marc Menchaca), who accounts for the sinister splash of scarlet on the driveway with a gruff single-word explanation: “Deer.” His behavior is suspicious, but his directions are good. Barb spends the evening on the lake, fishing and reminiscing on the ice.
We reminisce along with her, through a rather unnecessary series of literal, weightless flashbacks to her younger self (played by Thompson’s daughter Gaia Wise) that are much less expressive and evocative than the simple shots of Thompson’s face as she looks through old photos or picks through a battered tackle box. Or, indeed, as she gazes with happy-sad-tired-lively eyes across the terrain’s forbiddingly beautiful vistas, which come courtesy of DP Christopher Ross and Finland, doubling for frozen wilds of the North Star State.
It’s not until the second time she visits the cabin that Barb discovers the reason for the bearded man’s caginess. Peering through a boarded-over window, she spies a terrified young woman (Laurel Marsden) tied up and gagged in the dusty basement. Immediately, despite the usual Screenwriting 101 contrivances like dodgy cellphone reception, a stalled vehicle and an ongoing scarcity of ammunition, she moves into into full-on, single-minded, kick-ass rescue mode, though some old habits, like apologizing for cursing every time she so much as says the word “damn,” die hard. And soon she discovers that ol’ beardy is not the main architect of malfeasance here. His wife (Judy Greer) is the crazy-eyed, wild-haired mastermind of the dastardly scheme, her motivation for which is perhaps hinted at by the Fentanyl lollipops she constantly sucks on, sometimes two at a time.
As it transpires, Barb may have more in common with the bearded man than it first appears. He too is expressing his devotion to an ailing spouse: It just manifests in a very different way to Barb’s tender care, briefly glimpsed, for her husband in his dying days But aside from one fertile and well-performed confrontation scene between the two, this is one of many available thematic strands that is left unexplored. Couple that to the severe underdevelopment of Greer’s character beyond “resentful psycho” and, despite the ongoing pleasures of watching Thompson shoot guns and plot escapes and perform surgery on herself using a fishhook, the unmistakable chill of missed opportunities hangs in the air.
Eventually, en route to a finale that strives for tragic poetry the rest of the film scarcely earns, the narrative ice wears so thin that it cracks under the weight of a moment’s thought. Why, given the acreage of empty space available, do the deranged duo set up their grim workshop a few feet away from Barb’s ice shelter? How does Barb, so competent and practised an outdoorswoman, manage to lose not only her bright red mitten but also her treasured wedding ring at a vital juncture? And why does she go to all the trouble of writing a supportive message in the frost of the basement window, and then neglect to wipe it off before it betrays her presence to the kidnappers? These are plot holes big and deep enough to drop a lure into and hook a fat trout. Yet sidestep them and “The Dead of Winter” entertains, largely due to Thompson’s sturdy portrait of grace clad in a sensible, fleece-lined overcoat of gumption.