Skip to main content

Leave The Snowman Out in the Cold


The Snowman sells itself on its titular gimmick. The imagery of a snowman connected to a serial killer thriller is a striking contrast of preconceptions. Children make snowmen, so how can something so juvenile be played as deadly? Well, it’s been done before, and even if not, The Snowman proves its title creation has very little bearing on what the movie’s actually about.
Based on the novel by Jo Nesbø, the story concerns a series of murders in an around Oslo, Norway and the alcoholic detective Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) attempting to solve it. He’s joined in this capacity by Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson) as they discover a series of dead women who’ve had their heads removed, and at each crime scene the killer has left a crude snowman as their calling card. Their investigation takes them from unsolved cold cases to political officials campaigning to host the Winter Games.
This movie was directed by Thomas Alfredson, whose last film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I liked quite a bit. Of course that film benefited from an intriguing source story by John Le Carre and a great cast performing as best they could. However, nobody in The Snowman seems to be giving their A game. This is Alfredson’s return to film after six years and he doesn’t seem to be putting effort in. Michael Fassbender, who’s usually pretty great, is very wooden in his performance here. Despite how troubled his backstory is, he never feels like he’s genuinely invested in the case -which might be the intention, but it’s lousy characterization then. Ferguson and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Hole’s former girlfriend give okay performances for what little character they’re working with. But the supporting cast are fairly unimpressive from Chloë Sevigny to David Dencik to James D’Arcy. Even Toby Jones doesn’t deliver as he usually does. However J.K. Simmons isn’t bad, though severely underused, and I don’t know what Val Kilmer is doing, but it’s weird and it’s welcome. I only wish he was in this movie a little more, because his screen-time is minimal.
Kilmer’s character however doesn’t factor a lot into the plot, which is most distracting because he’s set in another time period and supposedly has an impact on the current case. There are a few distracting plot-lines like this that don’t add much to the mystery or impact the crux of the story in any meaningful way. And most of these threads are left completely unresolved by the end of the movie; storylines and characters that are just never addressed and ultimately are completely pointless. You can really tell too that Harry Hole is a character from a book series, as he’s not written very strongly but for the indications that he has a past not revealed here, and he’s covered a lot of cases like this. He also undergoes no character development, a common trait of mystery series sleuths.
The snowman motif as I mentioned is mostly incidental. It’s there for its notable imagery more than anything else. It actually makes a few appearances that make no sense, none that are connected to murders that we see. The killer is just a serial killer stereotype rip-off, being just enough ahead of the cops to avoid them for a while while sending cryptic notes like the Zodiac. His backstory is really strange and his motives even with an explanation included, are a little unclear. He’s got a frightening weapon, but there’s nothing else intimidating about him. And the climactic confrontation between him and Hole ends in the most disappointing way possible, only for the movie itself to awkwardly and abruptly end shortly after. But that’s not a huge problem considering the story leading up to it never has your investment. The number of clunky scenes and sudden conveniences make it impossible to. It’s one of the most generic mystery movies I’ve ever seen, and a little bit of gore, some nonsensical detours, and a couple twists not hard to predict won’t change that. Also, for some reason everybody in the movie has the same ringtone and it doesn’t take long before it becomes unbearably annoying.
Compared to another murder mystery movie set in the dead of winter, Wind River, The Snowman lacks engaging characters or an original factor such as that films’ strong subtext on the socio-economic nature of Native American reservations and the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. The Snowman’s just dull and insensible. Even stripping it of the incongruous to incomprehensible plot points wouldn’t help what at its’ core is a fundamentally weak story.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more