Dead of Winter - Review 

Rating: 4 out of 5

EMMA Thompson shines in a Fargo-style thriller that combines high tension with brutal blood-letting and a surprising emotional kick.

Set in snowy Minnesota, the film finds Thompson playing a recently widowed good Samaritan, who happens upon a husband and wife pair of kidnappers (Marc Menchaca and Judy Greer), and the teenage girl (Laurel Marsden) they have taken prisoner and apparently intend to kill.

Summoning all of her resources, Thompson promises to save the girl, while attempting to keep one step ahead of the couple. But things don’t always go as planned and, as motivations become clear and loyalties divided, events take a bloody turn.

Brian Kirk’s film, from a script by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, is a gritty, serious film in the Coens’ style that only occasionally allows room for dark comedy.

For underpinning it is tragedy. Thompson’s character is informed by grief - both past and present - and her journey to the point she finds herself at is retold via flashback, to scenes where she first met and fell in love with her husband, through shared loss and sorrow, to the point at which her husband also dies.

It makes the film’s denouement even more poignant - an act of selflessness that is beautifully, if hauntingly captured by Jones.

Thompson also brings great dignity and determination to her performance, recalling some of her most emotional performances while also getting to tap into something more physical and gritty (outdoing even her recent badass in Down Cemetery Road).

It’s another performance to savour from the British acting legend.

But she’s matched by Greer’s icily determined primary villain: whose own motivations are driven by a fierce survival instinct that makes her situations quite literally life or death. Caught in between these two female adversaries, meanwhile, is Menchaca’s somewhat hapless husband, who bears the brunt of the movie’s violence.

Jones makes the most of the Minnesota settings to create a genuine sense of chill and danger, while also ensuring that the film maintains an always engrossing mix of tension and character development.

Without quite hitting the heights of the Coens’ masterpiece it is quite clearly inspired by, Dead of Winter still emerges as an eye-catching thriller in its own right; one that delivers on the required action while never losing sight of the complexity of emotions at play.

Certificate: 15

Running time: 1hr 37mins