Dead of Winter: Imitative But Very Well-Made

People who make movies usually love watching them too, and sometimes I'll stumble upon a movie that is more of a homage to another movie than it is one of its own. Aesthetically imitating another story isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the inevitability of such a movie is that it's going to live in the shadow of the one that inspired it. Take Brian Kirk's Dead of Winter, for example. It's like he bred Fargo and No Country For Old Men together, not for the sake of creating something new, but rather because of how much he loves the Coen Brothers. You've seen this movie before; you just don't know it yet.

Nonetheless, this movie not only avoids being a dud, but also rises to heights it may not entirely deserve because of first, technical aspects that are extremely far above average, and second, spectacular performances all across the board that really sell the plights of these characters. This is a very well-made movie, if not a particularly original one. It's also a surprisingly restrained movie. There is an endearing subtlety to be found in Dead of Winter that burns like a candle despite all the snow, a subtlety that is very rewarding if you're willing to pay attention to this movie and try to figure out what it's doing before it tells you out loud. At its best, this subtlety works perfectly in favor of a beautiful, kind heart at the center of the movie that beats like a compassionate drum.

Getting lost is always a nuisance, but getting lost on the back roads of rural Minnesota in the biting cold of winter can be just as dangerous as it is irritating. However, I wasn't too worried about the kind, elderly Barb. She's polite on the surface, but her niceness belies a toughened resolve, a resolve she'll need once she discovers that the reclusive, gun-toting couple she only wanted directions from has kidnapped a young woman and is holding her hostage in their basement. What follows is more or less Barb's attempts to outwit, outmaneuver, and, when that fails, outshoot the couple and save their prisoner. Dead of Winter is a genre film that is more in service of reminding us why the movies that inspired it worked as well as they did, but its undeniably formidable craftsmanship makes well-trod ground interesting again, even if it never so much as tries to be original.

This is a simple story told in a relatively straightforward manner. In many ways, it was relaxing to watch a well-made movie that didn't demand much of my attention, not that I'm going to under-analyze it or any other film because I'm feeling noncommittal. Emma Thompson's performance as the elderly but resourceful Barb is extremely likable, and there is something refreshing about watching someone who's not a young or fresh-faced heroine work so hard to beat the odds and do the right thing. In many ways, the surprising layers of the villains in this movie work just as well. I understood why they had fallen so low as to kidnap an innocent girl, and villains with real motives and mercifully little elaboration on them were more believable and grounded in reality, which is what this movie is obviously trying to be.

Granted, the sentimentality of Dead of Winter doesn't always work in its favor, and some of Kirk's sappier, more emotional storytelling choices undercut its darker tone rather than supplement it. Missteps are still missteps, though they are mercifully sparse. When Dead of Winter is doing what it does best - being a dark and gritty genre thriller akin to Fargo if it didn't have a sense of humor - it is a powerful and well-made movie with a lot of good things to say about it. Even if not everything about this movie works, nothing about it outright feels as though it shouldn't exist, and the technical aspects, aside from an occasionally overpowering score, work like a charm. This is a good movie, if not a perfect one.

DP Christopher Ross's cinematography is one of the best things about this movie. It makes the most of some sparse production design, leaning heavily on the natural beauty of the snowy wilderness. The contrast between light and dark pops with fantastic color, thanks to a healthy dose of spectacular color grading from Marina Stark, whose stunning work is making me reconsider my assumptions about whether it's relevant to talk about a colorist in a movie review. The sound design is just as subtle and attentive as the color grading is beautiful, and the tiniest of unexplained sounds can be ample cause for curiosity or even concern in this movie, a devil cackling quietly in the midst of the more minor details.

Again, this movie is more of a homage than an original work, but its accessibility makes the things that do work about it just a little bit more impressive than they'd otherwise be. Some of its subject matter can be unpleasant, so I wouldn't call Dead of Winter a popcorn flick, but it is nevertheless an entertaining thrill ride where all of its individual pieces mesh more than they don't. This is a return to a simpler era of Hollywood, an era where you don't have to watch an array of prequels to understand what's going on in a movie, or even pay as much attention to the story to catch those stray subplots and notice those bothersome details. This movie could have stood to avoid tacking on character motivations that don't add to the depth of the story so much as they come across as shallow pleas for empathy, but Dead of Winter remains a nail-biter from beginning to end, proof that less in the hands of an artist can be more, and a lot more. Speaking of which, let's go back to Emma Thompson and her unconventional hero for a moment.

Barb isn't a young, dime-a-dozen model of health and wellness, artificially inserted into a drama for nothing more than sex appeal's sake. She's something better, and that's a person who could be any of us, a flawed and believable person with good memories of a love lost. My favorite thing about Dead of Winter is that it could have been an ideal, yet chose to be something infinitely more valuable instead: genuine.

Dead of Winter - 8/10

Proverbs 11:3