Let It Snow looks like a thought experiment: could we remake The Revenant, shift the action to Georgia (the country, not the US state), swap out Leo for a relatively unknown female, and bring home the whole thing on a fraction of the budget The Revenant might have spent on turmeric tea?
The answer is a qualified yes. This is Ukrainian film-maker Stanislav Kapralov’s first feature and if not everything works you can’t fault his ambition.
So, yes, it’s a horror movie, of sorts, or starts out looking like one at least. There’s a pre-credits sequence where a Somebody gets killed gruesomely (a blameless young girl in this case) and then post-credits Let It Snow divides neatly into three chunks. We meet the people who are going to be monstered. They go off into a territory they probably shouldn’t be in. They get pitilessly monstered. The end.
Ivanna Sakhno and Alex Hafner are the stars. Sakhno is a Ukrainian actor you might know from the Star Wars spin-off Ahsoka. Hafner is a multilingual Austrian who convincingly plays the American Max here, to Sakhno’s Mia. They’re a couple of young snowboarders who’ve gone on a pilgrimage to a ski resort in Georgia in Eastern Europe specifically to do the Black Ridge. The same Black Ridge where the blameless young girl died pre-credits.
When they get there the spooky receptionist (Tinatin Dalakishvili) – saucer eyes, dressed entirely in black, pale eyebrows – tells them that the Black Ridge is closed, absolutely, and that no, not even a helicopter will take them there. For spooky good measure she kisses the crucifix hanging around her neck and marks the door to their room with a black cross.
Max and Mia are very much in love, Kapralov’s screenplay tells us. Then tells us again. And again. Then gives us a chaste lovemaking scene in case we’d not realised how much in love they are. Then reveals that Max is going to seize the opportunity this holiday offers to propose to Mia. Through the entirety of the film the action regularly pauses to remind us, in case amnesia had suddenly struck, that Max and Mia are, yes, very much in love.
Is Kapralov insisting on this love way too much, and that’s part of the plot? I couldn’t possibly say, but either way there is too much of it, even if something is trying to be said. The fact that Max seems a bit of an entitled dick may be in play here too.
In the way of these things Max has soon magicked up a helicopter by waving some dollars about and the couple are up on the Black Ridge, where yet more very cool drone work captures their first descent into the exhilarating whiteness. This movie won’t do the resort of Gudauri any harm at all. The snow looks deep and crisp and even, the runs pristine, and some of them frighteningly vertical.
But Max and Mia are not alone up on the ridge. There is a big bear up there. No, that’s The Revenant. There is a person on a snowbike up there, with an intent on wreaking terrible damage on the couple. But first the couple must be separated. Because this movie is mainly about Mia. She spends its last half, playing out over several days, trying to find the disappeared Max, out in the cold, with a malevolent presence on a snowbike trying to do her harm.
Not much happens, in all honesty. Which in trad horror terms is a no-no. But Kapralov is more interested in mood than event, and there is a ramshackle integrity to the whole thing. Sakhno also comes into her own in this last stretch as the weather ravages Mia’s peachy looks and lovely skin and she struggles to survive, all the while never abandoning the search for Max.
The horror genre has by this point partly given way to the survival genre, though Kapralov tries to do both. So as Mia gets into her final-girl T shirt – metaphorically only, it’s freezing out there – she’s also squeezing water from frozen snow, digging herself out of an avalanche and taking temporary refuge with an old Georgian muttering darkly about this being a “bad place”.
How does the mystery person on the snowbike fit into all this? They don’t really, and that’s the movie’s central problem – it’s the servant of two masters.
Let It Snow – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
