‘First we’re freezing, now we’re gonna get sunburned…’
Sometimes, all a movie needs is a what-if… scenario. Particularly in genre cinema. Frozen (not that one) presents us with a very simple premise – what if you got stuck on a ski lift in the freezing cold? Also, there are wolves. Director Adam Green presents us with that question and then answers it in a way that is pretty fucking gnarly…
Loved up young couple, Dan (Kevin Zegers) and Parker (Emma Bell), arrange to visit a ski resort with Dan’s childhood friend Joe (Shawn Ashmore). Pretty quickly, they end up stranded on the ski lift, and Green does a good job of justifying how they end up there. It’s all terrifyingly plausible.
One thing I loved about Frozen is how, wolves aside, it isn’t too far-fetched. Other than one absolutely disastrous and completely stupid decision by one of the characters to jump from the ski lift, everything else rings true. I’d probably do some of the stuff these idiots try here to escape from their awful situation, and Green sees the scenario through to its natural endpoint with frostbite, broken legs and all the rest of it. Of the three main cast members, one of them is noticeably the weakest of the three performance-wise wise but they are dispatched pretty quickly, and the film’s best moments arrive when it becomes a two-hander. By the end, I was genuinely gripped and fully invested in the survival of these stupid dummies, and that is all one can ask from a film about people getting stuck on a ski lift.
Frozen is a film that totally passed me by upon release back in 2010, but for horror hounds, it is well worth seeking out. I was frightened. I was freaked out. And when the credits rolled, I was delighted to be able to leave my sofa and go upstairs to my nice warm bed where there are, as far as I know, zero wolves. What a world.
