Dir. Adam Green (2010)
Three skiers are trapped on a chairlift after the resort they are staying at shuts down for the weekend.
CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
I fucking love Adam Green. Like, I’m a HUGE fan of his work, and I’ve watched pretty much everything he’s made. I love the passion that goes into his projects, the way that every film of his comes across as if one of us made it and just happened to be really good at making movies. You often hear that someone makes a “love letter” to the genre, but every single film Green makes feels this way, and in the absolute best way possible. Frozen is no different, a survival horror for fans of survival horror, and it’s a truly harrowing situation of which anyone could conceivably find themselves victim.
We’re going to have so much fun freezing to death together.
Three friends go skiing on a mountain and find themselves stranded on a chairlift after the park closes down for inclement weather. The park isn’t going to open again for another week, and they slowly begin to realize that they’re going to have to get off of the chairlifts to possibly survive. What follows is an intense and extremely tense journey, made all the more isolating by Will Barratt’s cinematography and Green’s choice to dangle from the same chairlifts to get the shots of the stranded friends. The fear is palpable as the situation becomes more and more drastic, and the choices that the characters make are the only ones they can make. Unfortunately, as would be realistic in this type of situation, no choices are good and nothing can help them.
The film is, of course, filled with the usual motley crew of Green’s acting troupe, even containing cameos by Dee Snider, Joe Lynch, and Green himself. Green also wrote the film, and he did a spectacular job, focusing largely on the things that people in this situation would think about when they knew that they were in a hopeless situation. The location is beautiful, filmed in Snowbasin, Utah (but of course being set in the Northeast, Green’s own stomping grounds,) and it looks as cold as its supposed to be. The soundtrack is largely the wind, which fits perfectly for the type of movie this is. Having spent a considerable amount of time in Maine, I can attest to the fact that being stuck on a skilift in this type of weather would fucking suuuuuuck.
But not nearly as much as getting your hand stuck to a skilift.
Who this movie is for: Survival horror lovers, Adam Green fans, Shaun White
Bottom line: Realistic, gritty, pure, isolationist survival horror at it’s best. Three friends vs. a mountain, suspended fifty feet above the ground with no way out. Adam Green does a masterful job of increasing the tension throughout, as the audience already knows what the characters will eventually discover: they’re well and truly fucked. Great film, and a wonderful addition to Green’s incredibly impressive filmography.
