FROZEN
Stars: Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell | Written and Directed by Adam Green
A typical day on the ski slopes turns into a nightmare for three snowboarders – Dan (Zegers), his best friend Joe (Ashmore), and his girlfriend Parker (Bell) – stranded on the chairlift before their last run. Dangling high off the ground with no way down, how will they survive frostbite, hypothermia and other unexpected dangers?
Adam Green’s Frozen is the second three character film I’ve seen in the past three days (the other being Pontypool). Both have a similar sense of claustrophobia, even though Green’s film is set in the wide open mountains, and both share similar ‘independent horror’ sensibilities, though I doubt you’d see any heads of the big three studios greenlighting this tale – even though the film is very similar to the disaster movies of the 70s, with an against all odds attitude that underlined those films. I will say though, that being a three actor film allows for a lot more character development in Frozen than in the many Irwin Allen productions of the disaster movie hey-day.
Frozen is also very much a man vs. nature affair, tapping into very primal fears that as modern man we have forgotten – nature, the elements, man as the hunted, etc. There are no villains in this movie – unless you count the preying wolves that pop up to terrorise our heroes at various points during the movie – merely three characters stuck in what is essentially a ‘can happen’ situation, fighting to survive against mother nature and their own fears and failings, and overcoming their own prejudices (and at times hatred) in order to live to see another day.
If there is a fault with the film it’s in the dialogue. Green has obviously – well obvious if you know his friendship with director Joe Lynch – written conversations between the two male protagonists Dan and Joe (whose character even shares the same surname, Lynch) as if it was him and his friend kicking back and chatting – only instead they come across as arrogant assholes rather than best buds. Whether this was due to the script or the delivery from the two male leads we’ll never know. However, once our three leads are stranded up the mountainside all bets are off and all thoughts of the ropey dialogue heard earlier in the film go out the window – by actually having his actors in the precarious situation of really being up a mountain on a ski-lift, Green manages to elicit real intense emotion from his cast. There’s not many actors who would agree to sit in a ski-lift, up a mountain, in freezing conditions, for god knows how long, all for the sake of a movie – so hats off to Emma Bell, Kevin Zegers and Shawn Ashmore and I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling the movie but Emma Bell in particular really stands out as one to watch – I challenge you not be impressed with how her character reacts to the situation…
This being a horror movie there’s bound to be gore right? Well yes, but not for gore’s sake. The effects in Frozen are used PERFECTLY, nothing is excessive and everything is truely believable – from the smallest case of frostbite to… I’m not saying (spoiler-tastic if I do) but Frozen is the first film to actually make me cringe through the use of effects in a long time.
If you read my review of Pontypool you’ll know I was impressed by what Canadian director Bruce McDonald did with his small cast, and with Frozen it seems Adam Green has answered right back – anything the Canadians can do, the Americans can do just as well.
