What Evil Lurks In the Snow?
Calling "The Last Winter" a horror movie about global warming suggests a top-down conception that belies its better points. Set in an Alaskan oil outpost, Larry Fessenden's new film succeeds when patiently building outward from ambient dread and well-acted character conflict. This discipline holds up fairly well for the movie's mysterious incursions from Mother Nature, though the inevitable payoff is a little too uneven.
Mr. Fessenden, who also produces the work of other small-scale horror directors, has taken this graduated tack before, often relying on evocative locations. His 1997 film "Habit" germinates a vampire story in a character sketch shot on the director's own East Village turf and grounded in his own disarmingly lived-in performance. And in his last effort, the more widely seen "Wendigo," Mr. Fessenden smartly delves into the historic spookiness of New York's Catskills.
Like "Wendigo," "The Last Winter" finds menace in the snow, but for this batch of strandees the scale and stakes are larger. In the windswept expanses of the Alaskan hinterlands, backslapping project manager Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) heads a team establishing a beachhead for the petrol giant North Industries. Monitoring their endeavor is government greenie James Hoffman (James LeGros) in a thankless position of oversight that Pollack views as strictly optional.
Except for tensions with Pollack, Hoffman is well integrated into this wind-chapped polar family, which includes a mechanic named Motor (Kevin Corrigan) and Max (Zach Gilford), the college-age son of a friend of Pollack's. Hoffman even bunks up with Pollack's former (and younger) flame, Abby (Connie Britton), who helps run the place. Their latent triangle allows more than just a red-vs.-blue locking of horns, and Max's naïve presence subtly injects a cross-generational awareness fitting to the theme of environmental legacy.
A chill wind blows over this microcommunity, first literally, with much roving of Mr. Fessenden's camera, and then with spectral intimations in the snow-streaked night. As obsessions and suspicions segue into curdling sanity (and lead one crazed member to a "Blair Witch Project"-style testament), Hoffman scribbles away about "empathy with the land" and tussles with Pollack. The site of an earlier oil-drilling attempt becomes a locus of fascination, like a haunted portal. A body is found; rain falls.
What exactly is out there — roughly, the supernatural price of oil — frightens less than the film's sense of disaster glimpsed at its edges. The team's outpost, at first a cozy warren, gives way to the paradoxical claustrophobia of the snowy wilds, a feeling further developed during a sortie on foot by Hoffman and Pollack. As the group is besieged by something beyond its grasp, the film evokes not only infinite forces unleashed but also, in that claustrophobia, the newly bounded bounty symbolized by global warming.
The future shock is far from necessary to enjoy "The Last Winter," but it's helpful for viewers expecting the usual suspenseful build-up and show-and-tell. Mr. Fessenden's camera, when it swoops or tracks, isn't always meant to punctuate or signal a scare so much as instill an ambient panic (though for my money, his work in "Habit" felt more precise). The use of computer graphics, however, will strike some as pleasingly primitive and others as unneeded or even hokey; similarly, an audacious final shot hovers at the edge of low-budget brilliance.
"The Last Winter" grounds its mounting desperation in a couple of above-average performances. Mr. Perlman plays well with the blustery pioneer who falters, and Mr. LeGros stops his character's quiet self-assurance short of smugness to keep their match-up from getting obvious. Ms. Britton is also sturdy, and all are adequately supported by the rest of the cast, which is called upon to dispense the endgame follies and ominous pronouncements of the genre.
One thing "The Last Winter" is not is a scolding fable (not least because you don't get good cinema from scientists rechecking their calculations, finding everything is copacetic after all, and breaking out the beer). On the level of horror filmmaking alone, Mr. Fessenden proves amply capable of instilling dread, whether it's something we want to feel or not.
