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Movie Review: 'The Snowman'

Unfinished Thriller Embarrasses All Involved

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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Before I formally go into my review of The Snowman, let me preface this review stating my respect for director Tomas Alfredson. In press interviews for The Snowman he is not sugar-coating the film’s problems. He’s been up front about the abrupt production time in Norway, the lack of a finished script and the reshoots that nevertheless failed to find the missing pieces of what is one truly jacked up puzzle of a movie.

The Snowman stars Michael Fassbender as the horrifically named detective Harry Hole. Harry is a drunk who likes to pass out and wake up in strange places on the frozen streets of Norway. When he’s relatively sober, Harry is a famed detective whose cases are studied for his remarkable investigative success. His latest case following his latest bender comes when he spies a junior detective, Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), sneaking away with confidential files.

Harry decides to take up the younger detective’s cause, investigating a series of bizarre missing person’s cases. Each of the cases focuses on blonde women with secrets of some sort that may or may not be related to sex or something; the film is comically unclear. The killer has a thing for snow which is also rather comical as the film is set in Oslo. When the younger detective mentions that snow is a trigger for the killer we are led to wonder just how big that body count might be considering the part of the world the killer inhabits.

While the serial killer story is the A-Plot, the B-Plot about Harry’s former home life is far more fleshed out and given more development. This is bizarre for a number of reasons but mostly because the stuff about Harry, his ex-girlfriend Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the son who doesn’t know Harry is his real father (Michael Yates) and Rakel’s suspiciously nice new boyfriend Matthias (Jonas Karlsson) is stunningly dull. Each time the film pauses for the B-Plot to take center stage the film comes to an abrupt, jarring halt.

How the film justifies the B-Plot is completely hysterical in the end but I am not going to go into spoilers here, The Snowman is so stuffed with bad ideas that I almost recommend seeing it, thus I don’t want to spoil its unintended comic pleasures. I’m only half kidding, I kind of do want people to see this misguided movie just to confirm that what I saw really happened. Did the film actually spend endless hours of time on the girlfriend-son plot and forget to include important details about the serial killer plot? Did that really happen?

There is a sequence of The Snowman in the second act where we wallow impatiently through Harry talking around his unknown parentage to his teenage son that is immediately followed by Harry investigating a murder and seeming to pursue the killer that is jarringly edited to seem as if Harry is a psychic who doesn’t speak his amazing talent out loud. The scene rushes breathlessly from Harry rushing into the home of a victim, following unseen, unexplained clues to the least likely location imaginable for her missing head and finding it in a location that the killer could not have possibly gotten to in the time it took for Harry to arrive and yet still found time to build a snowman on which to place the missing head. It’s a baffling, unconscionably botched series of scenes.

Much of the plot plays like massive portions of the narrative were forgotten in the editing room or simply not filmed at all, something director Alfredson has since confirmed. The serial killer plot, the heart of the film, is entirely botched and plays as utter and complete nonsense. The big reveal of the killer seems to have been decided at random by choosing a character from the movie out a hat and making them the killer. Never mind that this renders several supporting characters as complete wastes of screen time.

Val Kilmer, Toby Jones, J.K Simmons, Chloe Sevigny all need not have shown up for their roles here as none have any bearing on the plot. Sure, red herrings are part of any good mystery movie but the red herrings in The Snowman are so clumsy and idiotic that they are unintentionally hysterical, like most other things in The Snowman. Kilmer is the biggest waste of all. The enigmatic Kilmer is jarringly unrecognizable as a detective on the same trail that Harry is on and he’s hamming it all the way up. It’s desperately over the top but it’s also classically Val Kilmer and rather mesmerizing in its awfulness.

Kilmer’s abrupt exit from the narrative is a genuine loss to the movie. He’s gone far too soon as he is the unquestioned, most interesting thing in all of The Snowman. Fassbender, the star of the movie allegedly, could have learned a few things about playing a drunken, loutish, know-it-all from Kilmer who’s made a strange and wonderfully eclectic career out of playing such characters. Fassbender seems to get the drunk part right but he’s far too reserved and European. Where Fassbender seems concerned for his dignity, Kilmer has no such compunction and it’s genuinely glorious.

Aside from Kilmer, however, there are few intended thrills to be found in The Snowman. How someone as talented as Tomas Alfredson ended up directing something so incompetent is a testament, I assume, to studio interference and the constraints of budget and time. Watch Let the Right One In or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and you will see that Alfredson is an artist of the highest order. I refuse to believe that The Snowman is solely his mess.

For insight into this, checkout this article from The Vulture in which Alfredson mentions a few of the challenges he faced in making the film. He inherited the project when Martin Scorsese dropped out but stayed on as a producer. The film had a greenlight but had to be shot immediately and with limited location time in Norway, which is where the film is set and thus somewhat important to the making of the movie. Reshoots were called for when Alfredson realized he didn’t have necessary shots but the reshoots were so limited that he was still unable to get important shots done in time.

Hang in there Tomas, Hollywood is not always a friendly place but good directors can always bounce back.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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