Movie Review: The Snowman

The Snowman * ½ / *****

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson.

Written by: Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup based on the novel by Jo Nesbø.

Starring: Michael Fassbender (Harry Hole), Rebecca Ferguson (Katrine Bratt), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Rakel), Jonas Karlsson (Mathias), Michael Yates (Oleg), Ronan Vibert (Gunnar Hagen), J.K. Simmons (Arve Stop), Val Kilmer (Rafto), David Dencik (Vetlesen), Toby Jones (DC Svensson), Genevieve O'Reilly (Birte Becker), James D'Arcy (Filip Becker), Jeté Laurence (Josephine Becker), Adrian Dunbar (Frederik Aasen), Chloë Sevigny (Sylvia Ottersen / Ane Pedersen).

 

Once in a while a group of extremely talented people come together to make one, downright awful movie – and that’s pretty much what happened with The Snowman. The director is Tomas Alfredson, whose last two films – Let the Right One In (2008) and Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (2011) are both great – and as you can tell by the dates on those, he normally takes his time making films. The cast includes talented actors all the way through – from Michael Fassbender to Rebecca Ferguson to Charlotte Gainsbourg to J.K. Simmons to Val Kilmer to Toby Jones to Chloe Sevigny. One of the editors is the great Thelma Schoonmaker – who has worked with Martin Scorsese (who executive produced this!) his entire career. The cinematographer is Dion Beebe, an Oscar winner for Memoirs of a Geisha – and that’s not even close to his best work (see his work on the pair of Michael Mann films – Collateral or Miami Vice for that). All of these talented people, and a lot more came together to make a film that quite simply is a mess on every level.

 

The Snowman is a confused and confusing thriller about a Detective named Harry Hole – and no, no one even mentions the fact that his name is Harry Hole – played by Michael Fassbender. Hole is apparently a genius detective – I say apparently, because we never see any evidence of that – who is also an alcoholic, which is basically what he’s doing in the opening scenes of the movie. He has demons, man, although the film never explains what those are. The film tries, I think, to misdirect us in the opening scene, a flashback to a traumatic childhood – but it’s clear that it’s not Harry’s childhood, so why he’s an drunken mess is one of the many, many things that are never explained in the film. Basically, the plot of the film involves Harry teaming up with new detective Katrine Bratt (Ferguson), when a series of women – all mothers – go missing. There are taunting letters sent to Hole – calling him Mister Police, and referencing all the clues he has left for him that will allow Hole to find him. The problem, of course, is that we never actually see those clues. There is also a subplot about Hole’s personal life – his ex-girlfriend Rakel (Gainsbourgh), and her teenage son – not Harry’s, although whoever the father is, isn’t in his life, and Harry has taken over a token father role. And then there is a series of flashbacks to 10 years ago in another part of Norway (who, by the way, the film takes place in Norway, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing, as every single person has a different accent) in which another drunken detective – Rafto (Val Kilmer, who is oddly and horribly dubbed in the film) investigates a murder that may or may not involve a wealthy asshole, Arve Stop (J.K. Simmons, who I think may be the only actor in the film trying to sound Norwegian – if only because his accent is so strange that I cannot figure out what the hell else he could be up to here).

 

The film plods along, confusingly, until its conclusion that you may well see coming like I did – not because the movie provides logical clues to the identity of the killer – who, by the way, cuts off his victims heads and replaces them with snowman heads – but because Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters (look it up) pretty much spells out who has to be responsible.

 

If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that the film was attempting to be a straight faced parody of this particular genre of the talking serial killer, toying with police – a genre that includes masterpieces like The Silence of the Lambs, Seven and Zodiac – and a whole lot of crap we’ve all forgotten by now. Fassbender is a talented actor, but he really has nothing to do here except look morose for the entire runtime of the movie – something he admittedly does well (seriously, he’s more miserable here than he was in Shame). No one is the supporting cast fares much better – except for maybe Gainsbourgh, who is one of those actresses I always find it impossible to look away from, no matter what she’s doing or saying – and the same holds true here.

 

To be fair, I guess you could say the film looks pretty good – you certainly feel the cold and snow in the film (unless it’s one of the scenes with fairly fake looking CGI snow anyway) – but even the creepy visuals are undercut by some of the more comical ones (sorry, the snowmen in the film aren’t really that creepy – they have nothing on the snowman from the Michael Keaton starring Jack Frost – that’s a snowman that will give you nightmares). In short, the film is an absolute, complete mess – one of those films that will be remembered for being awful. That’s something that can only happen on this level when so many of the people involved are so talented. You have to wonder watching this film – what the hell happened?