Emma Thompson and Judy Greer raise a thriller otherwise asleep and clumsy

Do you know these scenes in thriller thrillers or films when help finally arrives, cradles the public in a false sense of hope, only for filmmakers to kill this hope in abject cynicism? In The brilliantStanley Kubrick goes through the trouble to let us attach ourselves to Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), a potential savior, before Jack hacked him with an ax. In MiseryRichard Farnsworth The sheriff John T. Buster McCain is brutally killed by the disturbed superfyment Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), just for the moment, the author Paul Sheldon (James Cann).

Winter death is something of a reversal of this formula. Barb (Emma Thompson) is a widowed fisherman whose stereotypical hokum in Minnesotan would be comically exaggerated in the hands of a lesser actor. She looks and acts as a cross between Mrs. Claus and McGuyver, apologizing for the use of the “curse of curse” condemn Between an intelligent reuse of everyday materials.

Barb is on a sad vacation. It crosses the winter tundra of the rear wood of Minnesota (in reality, in Finland, but it will do the trick) at Lake Hilda isolated for ice fishing. But, really, she intends to pay tribute to her late husband by dispersing her ashes on the site of their first unusual meeting.

Why Barb intends to do that NOWWhen it is clearly dangerous to shake in the snow in an old beaten truck, is beyond the reasonable explanation, but Néfère, it is just lost outside an old dusty cabin where the purple and camouflage jacket (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca, respectively credited as such, for any reason) have removed the young Leah (Laurel Marsden) unknown. Suddenly, Barb must turn into the soft and marmic version of John McClane by Bruce Willis Die hard.

Dead of Winter is unnecessarily complicated by its flashback structure

It is a fun premise, and Nicholas Jacoson -Larson and Dalton Leeb put everything quite effectively – at the beginning. Here is a nice woman, whose altered and perpetual smile denies a broken heart, loaded with a type of heroism with which she has no previous experience, deeply in a snowy valley without the possibility of safeguarding the police. But, after his first juicy act, the writers opt for a mystery box that disables details that never really serves history, and the direction of Brian Kirk is clumsy and handful. The end result is a Sputy action which is only sporadically tense.

There is no reason for such a simple story to be so convoluted on delivery, or why we should not be aware of the relevant details. Here is what we TO DO Knowing beyond Barb sorrow: the character of Greer is dying, with incessant nose bleeding and a dose of fentanyl on the side of her mouth as if she were Clint Eastwood with a toothpick in Good, bad and ugly. Her husband is a kind of dope, but thanks to an exposure to heavy feet, it is clear that the couple stole a pharmacy under the threat of a weapon and kidnapped leah in the process.

A large part of the other “information” of the film is distributed via Hallmark flashbacks where the real girl of Emma Thompson, Gaia Wise, plays her young me, in scenes that do not do much, except for what extent their relationship was pleasant. Otherwise, the film does not give us a ton in the path of the plot, which is sincerely correct. When the film relies on the extraordinary capacity of Thompson and Greer to raise their equipment, or on its own Rube Goldberg decorations, it is done quite well. Its structure and slow bleeding of information on the character behave of self -awareness, unworthy of its ability to maintain tension.

Thompson and Greer are really extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête almost saves the company of Kirk of the marasts. The two coming to the battlefield in non -different circumstances, they offer very different approaches to the manipulation of sorrow, altruism or its absence which could occur in the worst circumstances. Their respective actor clinics are appreciable efforts, but it is not enough to save Winter death entirely. That you want to see Barb Save Leah is another story, a mystery whose origins are unfortunately frozen in the lake.