There is much to admire about Emma Thompson in DEAD OF WINTER, not the least of which is the way she captures the cadence and the spirit of the Minnesota accent with the same effortless skill that embodies the rest of her performance. Virtually silent for most of her time on screen, she is simply riveting whether her character is remembering seminal moments from her sweet marriage to the love of her life or finding a way to take down a psychotic woman with a gun and no conscience. She tells a lifetime story without the vagaries of language and the effect is profound and profoundly moving.
Thompson is Barb, a woman getting on in years who for reasons that will be revealed when the time is right, narratively speaking, is heading out from her modest mobile home in the eponymous season to fish in a remote lake that is full of memories. When she gets lost on the way, she stops at a lonely house for directions from a taciturn man (Marc Menchaca) who is quick to explain the blood on the snow near his home belonged to a deer. It is a fateful meeting that foreshadows much as Barb goes on to the lake, where she relives old time via flashbacks of her first date with her late husband, Carl (played by Thompson’s daughter Gaia Wise and Cúán Hosty-Blaney). Her bittersweet reverie is interrupted by gunplay, which leads her back to the house with the blood-stained snow, and a struggle to rescue a young girl (Laurel Marsden) from the clutches of that ci-mentioned psycho played by Judy Greer with such maniacal focus, we must ask ourselves if, like Thompsen, there is anything she >can’t< do.
Barb prompts the same question. This exemplar of Minnesota nice refuses to abandon the girl imprisoned in the basement despite no cell phone service, staggering odds, and a bullet wound that her first attempt at doing the right thing brought her. Thompson doesn’t suddenly become an action heroine, surprising us with ninja skills or McGyver-esque cunning. Instead, she is completely believable because of the grit, determination, and unshakable human decency that she builds into Barb’s DNA. Lullng herself into calmness when sewing up her wound by comparing the task to making a quilt, albeit a disgustingly bloody one, is a small moment of inner strength called forth into resilience that Thompson makes funny and stirring at the same time. Working herself into an adrenalin rush to face off against a rife or becoming a calm presence of hope to the girl, she makes Barb a woman on the metaphorical edge, but sure of her footing.
Director Brian Kirk is wise enough to spend most of the film focusing on Thompson’s infinitely expressive face. On it, reverie and sadness merge, devastation is signaled by an absence of affect, and fear is the wellspring of courage. This is not a showy exercise. This is an artist who values subtlety as the most potent of vehicles to make a seemingly simple woman into one of enormous depth.
DEAD OF WINTER is a counter-intuitive action film, full of silence from which violence springs all the more insidiously for the wide-open, deserted landscapes of snowy rural Minnesota it inhabits. The suspense is gripping, and so is the love story told in flashback that brought Barb to the wrong place at the right time. Thompson has never been better in a film that is more than worthy of her.
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