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Adam Green’s Frozen is one of the finest pieces of survival horror I’ve ever seen. The set-up is simple, the logistics are plausible, the characters dynamic, and the threat is terrifyingly real. The result is a picture that authenticates those feelings of helplessness, mounting dread and blood-chilling desperation that come with similar real-life scenarios. Following the unfortunate situation of 3 skiers stranded on a chairlift over a long holiday weekend, Frozen generates the same kind of tension and primal disquiet that Jack London captured in his piece of short fiction ‘To Build a Fire’. By the third act Green is even paying full homage to London; introducing a couple of starving wolves into the already dire scenario.

What it all adds up to is honestly scary. These aren’t jump-scares or even gathering fear, but a pervasive anxiety that begins creeping in, like the winter chill on that ski lift, just as things start going wrong. By the end, I dare you not to look away. Frostbite, unexpected falls, and the aforementioned animal scavengers are presented in a gruesome, matter-of-fact way that only cements the dark reality that Frozen presents us with. Essentially, it’s giving us that reminder that the universe isn’t always working in our favor, and sometimes the unpredictable spice of life can be pure poison. Put another way; some days you eat the wolf, some days the wolf eats you.

Frozen marks Green’s third directorial picture and he proves to be a genre artist constantly in the act of improving as a filmmaker. Hatchet, his trite and dopey debut film was a over-earnest homage to 80’s slashers, but his follow-up Spiral was a compelling and effective psychological thriller that was more than a little reminiscent of Hitchcock.

In Frozen, he’s graduated even further, dropping all notions of genre frosting or horror convention and doing what the Master of Suspense did best, finding the biting teeth of the mundane and sinking them deeply into the viewer’s psyche. You start by scoffing at the potential for thrills, questioning the plausibility of the scenario, but by the end you are holding on for dear life with the rest of those poor souls and most of the credit can go entirely to Green and his trio of actors. They make the microcosm of the chair lift a breeding ground for frustration, sick terror and even selfless sacrifice, and they do it without ever showing their hand or making the outcome predictable.

Shawn Ashmore (ironically, he was Iceman in the X-Men films) is the most recognizable face in this small cast, but he’s doing good and believable work here and he is matched in his efforts by his co-stars, Emma Bell and Kevin Zegers. All of them deliver performances that feel real and take into consideration not just the physical taxation on a body exposed to the elements, but what kinds of mental and emotional assault occur when placed in situations like this. Green’s script sets them up with a healthy dose of tension right from the get-go, as Ashmore’s character is the best friend to Zegers, who is none to happy to find he’s been more or less replaced by the cute and forthright Bell.

These buried nuances actually grow into towering obstacles once they find that the ski-lift operator has left them up in the air, suspended over the slope, for an extended period of days that won’t allow for their survival. When grief and loss enter in, I was honestly amazed at how effecting it is. When Bell begins to agonize over the fact she forgot to feed her puppy at home, and starts fearing that it will starve to death when she never returns, I found myself fully immersed into the reality of film.

I imagine there will be two camps with Frozen; those that can buy the premise, and let Green take them on a dark-side tour of ‘worst case scenario,’ and those that will fight what the film is doing tooth and nail. Personally, I was thoroughly riveted and for my money Green explained away most of the lingering plot inconsistencies that come with making sure the three friends stay up there all weekend without rescue. What works though is the attention to details both physical and psychological and the daring on the part of the entire team to go looking for fear in an unlikely place. What they get for their troubles is a stand-alone tale of survival that will cause skiers to rethink that last trip down the slope for years to come.  

Previously seen on Atomic Popcorn