October 2023 Bonus Review: Winter of Frozen Dreams
The actors and the pathetic fallacy work hard; it's not enough.
the true crime that's worth your time
On Christmas 1977, Gerald Davies, 31, walked into Madison Police Headquarters and announced: “Last night I helped bury a body in a snowbank.”
Davies, a clerk at the University of Wisconsin, said he did not know the dead man’s identity or how he died. His role was simply to help dispose of the body for his fiancée, Barbara Hoffman.
The story
I don’t know where to begin with 2009’s Winter of Frozen Dreams, a film with a lot going on outside the frame and not enough inside it. …Okay, that’s not completely accurate; the issue is that it’s hard to tell whether the occasionally stately pace and ambiguous shot composition is purposeful, or paralyzed. It’s not a bad sit…probably? I’d love to speak more definitively, but I can’t, because I still don’t think I understand what the movie’s trying to do, and why.