Screen Daily
The fourth feature from idiosyncratic American independent director Larry Fessenden, The Last Winter expertly conflates the psychological dread fundamental to the horror genre, broadening it out into a deeper, existential malaise about the disintegration of civilisation.
A story about the madness that engulfs a disparate group at a remote Alaskan drilling site, the movie is clearly influenced visually and thematically by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. It is marred by some didactic passages about ecological and corporate plunder, but otherwise this unnerving allegory on greed and conquest was one of the major discoveries at Toronto.
Admittedly, it is a difficult film to market: like the works of George Romero, The Last Winter is an intellectual horror movie that mourns the loss of humanity. The right US distributor should find a way to take advantage of the movie’s strong visual qualities, excellent cast and probing content to reach a discerning audience. Internationally, the film’s topical concerns about the devastating environmental consequences of developing alternate energy sources carry a strong contemporary relevance.
A team of scientists and engineers is dispatched by North Industries, an American energy conglomerate, to a remote outpost of the Alaska frontier for a top-secret drilling expedition. Fessenden expertly draws out the group dynamics, quickly establishing the tension between Hoffman (LeGros), the scientist assigned to assess the environmental impact, and Pollock (Perlman), the entrepreneurial, driven drill leader who is highly sceptical of Hoffman’s credentials. Their rivalry is exacerbated by their shared sexual history with Abby (Britton), who is now sleeping with Hoffman.
But the crew’s private drama is soon replaced by strange, unexplainable actions at their command centre. Abnormally high temperatures imperil the group’s ability to import the heavy machinery required for the drill; later Maxwell (Gilford), the least experienced member, goes missing and turns up at the base hours later but subject to increasingly bizarre behaviour.
Soon it becomes clear that something is dangerously amiss, as the group’s severe isolation and the increasing presence of some primordial force slowly begins their collective unraveling. Maxwell, is the first to die but not the last, as fellow workers succumb to a variety of demises, from a plane crash to suffocating each other.
Eventually Hoffman and Pollock undertake a perilous quest to get help that evolves into their mysterious and unnerving confrontation with the malevolent force.
The Last Winter is an unusual work, an art movie that frightens and disrupts. Fessenden’s tone is to effectively underplay the horror, as the stillness and foreboding sense of rupture contribute to the developing panic.
It loses a little something in the final act, when Fessenden finally unveils the ghostly, spectral presence that haunts the group, but by then it is governed by a sharp, punishing and dismayingly believable pessimism about the human condition that instils fright in its audience.
Shooting in Iceland, Fessenden uses the blindingly white snowbound landscapes to signal an inescapable sense of doom and terrifying regret. Working with cinematographer G Magni Agustsson, he deploys sinuous, vertiginous camera movements and vertical, high overhead shots that underline the emphatic break between civilisation and nature: the The Last Winter’s power is in how actions and events are felt as much as they are seen.
The effects work is strong, presenting the crew’s nemesis in two guises: a massive, almost alien figure; and a spectral, ghost-like herd of deer which charge in huge formations and stomp a couple of victims to death.
Copyright 2006 Screen Daily
