No film this year will be second guessed more than Adam Green’s third and most mature effort FROZEN. Green is a horror filmmaker, there’s no doubt about that – but in an effort to avoid being further boxed in, he’s scheduled his projects in a way to showcase the full range of his abilities. HATCHET showed us his campy, tongue in cheek side in which he embraced his love of 80’s slasher films but in turn wanted to stick to their darker edge – fun but not dumb. SPIRAL (which just hit Blu-ray this week and was co-directed by AVATAR’s Joel David Moore) showed us his ability to generate high tension on a low budget while developing layered, interesting characters. FROZEN takes his skills to a new level, giving us single location horror with a looming threat but without artificial scares.
The set-up is incredibly simple and plays upon the natural born, often pondered fears people have of being trapped, suspended in a gondola and asks: what would you do? There’s no supernatural threat, no big twists, no crazed killer toying with them to turn the emotional knife; it is the story of three kids, none of them particularly bright or talented, who push the envelope a little too far and end up stuck exposed to the elements with no food, water or way to call for help. If there’s one film it invokes and is most reminiscent of, it is OPEN WATER – that is if OPEN WATER had likable characters, a satisfying ending and I didn’t walk out with the urge to punch the movie in the throat.
Key to the success of the film is its shot structure, replete with lofty, floating camera swings that keep the audience suspended 50 feet above the ground along with the cast. Green didn’t cheat the audience with a lot of green-screen work. Instead the gondola is really up there with the actors in it, dangling in freezing temperatures. There’s nothing about the film that looks or feels artificial. And that authenticity drives the fear of the film. It is claustrophobic without leaving the comfort of the wide open wilderness.
But when the tensions begin to rise, and terrible things begin to happen to our cast, Green relishes in it just enough to fuck with the audience and tighten your gut, but never so much that he seems to be really enjoying it. This isn’t about gore. This is about effect. When grisly things happen, they happen in very disturbing, emotionally resonant ways; it is deeply affecting. People have been questioning the validity of feinting and illness at various screenings of this and while I cannot attest to subsequent screenings, ours had one genuine fainter and a few who felt physically uneasy. It gets under your skin.
The performances here are solid, but standing out is Shawn “Iceman” Ashmore, who has thus far managed to slip under a lot radar. He’s a great actor finally given something to chew on here and really runs with what he’s given. While Kevin Zegers and Emma Bell both do very well with what they’re given, I get the feeling Green responded more to Ashmore’s character Joe Lynch - named after a fellow horror director and best friend – than he did the other two. Ashmore is charismatic, likable and the person you most feel for in the situation, despite it being just as much his fault as anyone elses. Also appearing in a bevy of cameos are a slew of Green’s regulars, including Kane Hodder, Joel David Moore, Rileah Vanderbilt, Green himself and I think I even saw the aforementioned Joe Lynch.
FROZEN hits all the right notes, building tension then releasing it in white knuckle scenes of brutality that will have you writhing in your chair and stomping on the floor.
But that’s not to say that everyone is going to love this film. As I said at the very beginning, people are going to second guess the ever loving shit out of this film. What people know and what people think they know about the way things work is going to come into play hard and fast here. After all, Green is deriving the bulk of the power of this work from real world tension and fears, and in doing so needs to at the very least maintain the illusion of real world physics and interactions. And for the most part he manages to. Even he admits he cheated twice (in small ways that I never heard a single complaint about) but there will be at least one person in every theater who is going to call bullshit in one way or another, whether they know what they’re talking about or not.
Compounding the problem here is that Green chose to frame the story around every day characters – your typical, average, everyday pretty people common to horror films – allowing the audience to more readily identify with them and their plight. The problem with this, especially at our Butt-numb-a-thon screening is this: if you’re an AICN reader, odds are pretty good that you’re rocking something better than a 100 IQ, making you smarter than the characters in this film. This may lead to the occasional “well, that was stupid,” decision that will cause you to turn to your friends and say “No, what you’re supposed to do in this situation is X” before being summarily shushed and elbowed back into silence. The characters aren’t particularly dumb, but like most people, they have little to no survival training and don’t have a completely firm grasp on the laws of physics.
That said, when all is said and done, what few conflicts might exist are forgivable for the sake of the narrative. This isn’t a documentary, it’s a high grade suspense film predicated upon an unlikely but feasible series of unfortunate circumstances. How Green deals with the pacing, characters and story all drive this towards being a truly great entry into what one can only really call survivalist-horror. And come on, on a geek level, you have to at least love the ironic joy of watching Iceman threatened with freezing to death. This comes Strongly Recommended.
