{"id":179180,"date":"2025-09-24T19:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T19:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/179180\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T19:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T19:13:10","slug":"emma-thompson-goes-fargo-in-frigid-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/179180\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Thompson Goes Fargo in Frigid Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 66-year-old two-time Oscar winner who\u2019s still near the height of her powers and has presumably made enough money for her grandkids to retire at birth, Emma Thompson<\/a> could spend the rest of her life guest-starring on British TV shows and sleeping in her own bed at night and no one would think any less of her. But actors have to act (we love them for that, and that for them), and even a screen icon of Thompson\u2019s cachet is powerless to pass up the prospect of saying dialogue like \u201cFreakin\u2019 fiddlesticks shitBUNS!\u201d in a Marge Gunderson-thick Brainerd accent.<\/p>\n

So while the rest of us might have been happy to stay warm at home, Thompson hoofed it out to the snowy wilds of Finland in order to film<\/a> \u201cDead of Winter<\/a>,\u201d a programmatic but tightly plotted thriller \u2014 set amidst a brutal Minnesota blizzard \u2014 in which she plays a widowed ice fisher who asks the wrong guy for directions on the way to a certain lake (he\u2019s not quite in the middle of feeding a human body into a wood chipper, but he might as well be). Hardly a scene goes by where Thompson isn\u2019t beaten, chased, and\/or shot at in sub-zero temperatures, but you get the sense that all of the frostbite in the world couldn\u2019t have stopped her from getting her own little taste of \u201cFargo<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Harris<\/a> \"'Slow<\/a> <\/p>\n

That passion \u2014 that enduring sense of purpose \u2014 is reflected across the course of a small but satisfying movie about people who are either desperate for something to live for, or living only for their desperation. If only they could find a way forward for themselves. Barb Sorenson (Thompson) is looking for precisely that when she heads out into the cold for a day on the ice. All \u201cMinnesota nice\u201d and quiet sorrow, she planned to start her search at a fishing spot that was especially meaningful to her late husband; the only problem is that she can\u2019t find it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So she asks Camo Jacket \u2014\u00a0as Marc Menchaca\u2019s oafishly menacing character is identified in the credits \u2014 to point her in the right direction, even though he doesn\u2019t seem like the most trustworthy fella. Minutes later, after Barb\u2019s truck breaks down, she watches Camo Jacket hunt down and hand-tie a young woman (Laurel Madsen) who escaped from his house. In lieu of anything else to do with herself, Barb decides to intervene. But sneaking into Camo Jacket\u2019s basement and stealing the girl won\u2019t be easy, because Camo Jacket is married to Purple Lady (played by a rifle-toting Judy Greer<\/a>, a fentanyl lollipop always lodged in her mouth), and she isn\u2019t quite as helpless as her husband.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Directing from a lean and functional script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, Brian Kirk (\u201c21 Bridges\u201d) maneuvers these four characters around each other with care and a clear eye for tension. The action is taut, the stakes are clear, and Kirk never misses a chance to remind us that all of these are just regular people who\u2019ve crossed paths in a dark place. These are humble Americans more accustomed to baiting fish than shooting humans, and while that may not excuse all of the thriller cliches this movie indulges when push comes to shove during its do-or-die third act (i.e. someone running out of ammo right when they\u2019ve lined up a certain kill shot), every Coen brothers-esque blunder reinforces the idea that these characters have been forcibly diverted from the lives they were meant to live.<\/p>\n

To that end, the movie\u2019s greatest conflict might be that between their folksy earnestness and their flinty desperation, and it\u2019s a conflict that every member of the cast is able to articulate within themselves without resorting to caricature. The mystery as to why Purple Lady and Camo Jacket have kidnapped a suicidal woman is too opaque at first (something to do with organ harvesting, it seems?), and then too impractical by the end (she\u2019s getting a doctor to do what?), but Greer always shines as a self-interested villain, and she manages to sell the absolute shit out of an unscrupulous woman who\u2019s doing what she has to in order to survive. You may not believe in the full scope of her character\u2019s circumstances, but not for a second will you doubt the wincing sincerity of her \u201csorry, not sorry\u201d attitude toward saving her own skin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Greer\u2019s Purple Jacket makes a terrific foil for Thompson\u2019s Barb, whose \u201caw shucks\u201d affect is pointed towards risking her life for a perfect stranger. Recurring flashbacks \u2014\u00a0in which a younger Barb is embodied by Thompson\u2019s own daughter Gaia Wise \u2014\u00a0do more to disrupt the film\u2019s suspense than to meaningfully complicate its protagonist, but the most impactful of these glimpses into her marriage offer some insight into the various roles she hoped to play over the course of her life (wife, mother, entrepreneur, etc.), and hint at the difficulties that have come from being recast against her will. <\/p>\n

If Thompson exudes too much tenacity for us to need such labored glimpses into her character\u2019s past, the extra insight makes it that much easier to buy her character\u2019s transformation into a badass good Samaritan, and \u201cDead of Winter\u201d never loses sight of what its backwoods shenanigans mean to Barb on a deeper level. People will do anything to survive, but a life without purpose can be worse than death; watching Emma Thompson<\/a> bleed, shiver, and shoot her way through a movie this cold is proof enough of that.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

Vertical Entertainment will release \u201cDead of Winter\u201d in theaters on Friday, September 26.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 66-year-old two-time Oscar winner who\u2019s still near the height of her powers and has presumably made enough…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[106371,38548,88,2695,206,900],"class_list":{"0":"post-179180","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-dead-of-winter","9":"tag-emma-thompson","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}