Almost like a cousin to “Fargo.”
“You had to pick the middle of nowhere” is the first line spoken by Emma Thompson’s character Barb. She’s driving with a map through Minnesota in snowy conditions, and ends up lost. She then asks for directions at a cabin where there’s a gun in a car and some blood in the snow. The guy says there was a deer accident, but do you really believe that?
That’s how “Dead of Winter” begins, and I would like to think that it’s is going for that “Fargo” approach when they have a snowy environment, the same state, the violence and carnage, and the leading lady going for the accent in the tradition of Frances McDormand. And that would happen to be Thompson as Barb.
After our introduction to her, she goes on an icy lake and reflects on her youth with her boyfriend-turned-husband Carl. Until gun shots are heard, and she witnesses a kidnapping. That guy she came across with-nicknamed Camo Jacket (Marc Menchaca)-is married to the mastermind-nicknamed Purple Lady (Judy Greer)-who orders the kidnapping on the girl named Leah (Laurel Marsden) for her liver transplant.
It’s funny because a few years ago, I panned the horror sequel “Don’t Breathe 2,” in which the plot twist required bad parents trying to harvest organs from their little girl to save her mother. Real parents of the year. In this case, Purple Lady and Leah are obviously not related, but the dying woman knows the young woman is living on borrowed time. “Dead of Winter” is the better version of that subject matter.
For most of the movie, Barb partially sets traps for them or, at the very least, tries to weaken them. For example, she makes the bad guy fall through the icy water, goes back to their cabin, and gets all their clothes wet, so the hypothermia can kick in further. And in flashbacks, we see Gaia Wise as young Barb and Cuan Hosty-Blaney as young Carl, and how their joys and sadness can affect her future. We can already sense that the husband is dead if we don’t see him with Thompson for most of the movie.
Some of the flashbacks get pretty boring and we begin to lose our interests, but our anticipations boosts up once we deal with the confrontation between Thompson and Greer. And before that, we’re interested to see what this old lady has come across and how she plans to help the girl. It’s also funny, because I just praised a movie about a teenager on the brink of being kidnapped in “One Battle After Another.” So we have two kidnappings this week in theaters, and they work on different levels. One on the Paul Thomas Anderson level, the other like a cousin to “Fargo.”
Directed by Brian Kirk (“21 Bridges,” TV’s “The Day of the Jackal”) and penned by first-time writers Nicholas Jacobson-Larson (a conductor for “The Hate U Give” and “Leave the World Behind”) and Dalton Leeb (an actor from “Solitary” and “Feeding Mr. Baldwin”), “Dead of Winter” is a solid piece of entertainment. It’s not the best of the genre out right now, but it’s a watchable movie with some exciting and curious moments, especially with how Thompson is the hero and Greer is the villain.
