Film Comment
Larry Fessenden works with horror and irony the way Giacometti worked with clay—paring away at conventions, shaving matters down to their starkest. This might not bode well for his hapless characters’ physical welfare, but it does preserve the dread.
Fessenden’s Habit (97) was a Looking for Ms. Goodbarwith fangs, and one of the first films to cocktail shake sex, blood, and HIVinto a horror context; Wendigo (01), a chiller rooted in Indian lore about transmogrification, turned the seemingly placid terrain of snowy upstate New York into a realm of gothic foreboding.
It’s the second of these that echoes in Fessenden’s latest, The Last Winter, which is set in Alaska, and in which, unlike any of its obvious progenitors in Arctic creep—from The Thingto Zero Kelvin—the problem with the frosty landscape is that it isn’t cold enough. Centered on a group of oil prospectors, it is invested with a fear not of the supernatural, but the natural: the world is warming and as it thaws, something angry and septic is being unleashed out of the long-dormant, no-longer-perma permafrost.
The director, working from a script by himself and Robert Leaver, finds a lode of Hitchcockian potential out of doors, where snow makes a nightly flight across the stark white light of G. Magni Agustsson’s camera and where the more delusional members of the North Industries drilling team see phosphorescent herds of antlered phantoms stampeding through the gloom. Unexplained nosebleeds. Naked blue-white corpses with their eyes plucked out. Madness. Team leader Pollack (Ron Perlman), the quintessential short-fused, unmanageable manager, has quite a few problems on his hands.
The principal one, he thinks, is his polar opposite, Hoffman (James LeGros), an environmental activist and, significantly, Pollack’s physio-aesthetic rebuttal. Hoffman, who is there to monitor the ethically dubious North company, is emblematic of economy and conservation—he lacks the enormous resources, shall we say, of a Pollack, but has done as much as he can with what he has. (Think Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws.) Pollack, meanwhile, is ignorant, avaricious, and wastefully huge (think . . . the United States?). And there’s something larger than both of them, and far more dangerous, out there in the Great White North.
A lifelong New Yorker, Fessenden—whose sideline acting career has included playing an emergency-room patient strapped to a gurney in Bringing Out the Dead—doesn’t seem overly fond of the great outdoors. He finds in the tundra’s poverty of physical detail something vaguely corrupt. Characters often float in white, negative space, and the varied, always-fluid shooting suggests a searching for something to grasp hold of.
Fessenden has been long producing work by maverick filmmakers, often, but not always, in the horror genre (Douglas Buck’s 2006 remake of Sisters, for instance, but also Kelly Reichardt’s 1994 River of Grass, in which Fessenden played the lead). What he brings to his own film is an increasingly confident, collagist instinct with style and camera movement, a marriage of the visual with the visceral. No one comes away from films like Saw and Hostel thinking much about the lighting or the transitions, but even though The Last Winter has a certain immediacy, it also has a cumulative richness born of both terror and technique, plus a juxtaposition of interpersonal, indoor relationships against an ethereal, frigid void that stands in for the entirety of a miserable, exploited, and pissed-off planet. The Last Winter isn’t a message movie per se, but the inconvenient truth of the matter is that Fessenden, as he did with Habit’s post-AIDS vampire treatment, has found something profoundly, metaphysically scary within the facts and figures of global warming.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Film Comment.
