With winter coming, Casey Chong presents a selection of stranded-in-the-snow movies to add to the chills…
Films where the characters are trapped in a snowstorm due to various reasons – a car breaks down, a result of a plane crash on the icy location, or seeking a temporary shelter at a remote setting – has frequently been employed across genres, incorporating drama, thriller and horror tropes. Popular movies that adopt such a premise, such as The Shining, The Thing and The Grey, have tapped into the diverse themes of fear, isolation and survival, utilizing atmospheric dread and visceral tension to highlight the characters’ ordeal that threatens their mortality. Below we’ve brought together a selection of some of the more lesser-seen stranded-in-the-snow movies that deserve your attention and may have flown under your radar…
Society of the Snow (2023)
The harrowing true story of the 1972 Andes plane crash has been a subject of big-screen adaptation in 1976’s Survive!, and of course, the popular 1993 Hollywood-style dramatization in Alive. Then came J. A. Bayona’s Spanish-language version, eschewing the traditional Hollywood approach in favor of a raw and somber realism depicting the survivors of the Uruguayan rugby team enduring the harsh conditions, while stranded in the Andes mountains.
Given Bayona’s experience in the horror genre, first seen in The Orphanage, he adds this to his advantage, bringing in the gritty details of the freezing temperatures and the gradual desperation seen in the survivors. He even goes as far as preserving the authenticity of approaching the true story by insisting on a predominantly South American cast. Equally worth noting is Bayona’s narrative structure of stripping away the melodramatic excess, and instead, delving deep into the emotional and psychological toll from the survivors’ point of view to mostly visceral and compelling results.
Wind Chill (2007)
The little-seen Wind Chill, which arrived at the time Emily Blunt hit a breakthrough in The Devil Wears Prada, follows a story about a Pennsylvania university student sharing a ride in a male student’s (Ashton Holmes) car on a journey to Delaware. Neither of these characters is given names other than being credited as “Girl” and “Guy”, and what begins as a road movie of getting to know each other gradually turns into a nightmare after their car crashes and they are stuck in a snowdrift.
The rest of the movie spends its time with Blunt and Holmes’ characters trying to stay alive in the midst of being stranded on a backroad, allowing director Gregory Jacobs to make good use of the icy setting by putting them through the wringer both psychologically and emotionally. He even sneakily morphs the initially survival drama into a dread-inducing ghost story, while bringing out the best in Emily Blunt’s riveting performance as a trapped girl fighting for survival while enduring the strange occurrences of things that go bump in the night.
Arctic (2018)
Director and co-writer Joe Penna strips down the typical melodrama commonly associated with the story of survival and opts for the minimalist approach in Arctic. The story follows Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen), a pilot who has been stranded in the Arctic Circle after his plane crashes. He’s all alone, relying on his survival skills to stay alive, despite facing the brutally cold temperature of the polar circle.
Mikkelsen’s predominantly one-man show brings a restrained quality to his stoic portrayal of a survivor who refuses to give up, even though his initial hope of getting rescued by a helicopter responding to his distress beacon is dashed after it crashes. The subsequent story of him saving an injured passenger, played by María Thelma Smáradóttir, adds a much-needed sense of humanity to the movie’s otherwise uncompromising look of cold survival. Interestingly, the movie is nearly dialogue-free with only a few words spoken throughout its 97-minute runtime.
Cold Meat (2023)
French director Sébastien Drouin, whose prior credits include several short films and a television miniseries titled Fearless, doesn’t shy away from depicting a cold, brutal fact of being stranded in a blizzard in Cold Meat. It begins with a driver (Allen Leech’s David Petersen), who stops by the roadside diner and manages to save a waitress (Nina Bergman’s Ana) from her violent ex-husband (Yan Tual’s Vincent).
Initially, it looks as if Vincent’s subsequent revenge of getting back at David Petersen is given a subversive twist, leading to the story of two survivors (David and Ana) trapped in a car with no outside help whatsoever. Kudos to Drouin for escalating the tension and suspense without losing sight of these characters, thanks to Allen Leech and Nina Bergman’s respective engaging performances. He keeps the pace taut at just 90 minutes, trimming the excess in favor of a lean and mean survival thriller with enough visceral stakes.
Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)
The first three Wrong Turn movies stick to the formula of taking place in the backwoods, but returning director Declan O’Brien (2009’s Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead) traded the familiar setting for the snowbound location. This gives the slasher film series a refreshing change of setting while retaining most of the gritty nature that defines the franchise. The fourth movie benefits from a grisly 1970s-set prologue detailing the cannibalistic mutants’ subsequent breakout at the Glenville Sanatorium, and within the first act alone, O’Brien doesn’t waste time going for the jugular.
Fans of the Wrong Turn film series can look forward to a brutally graphic appetizer of gore and violence, which then increases exponentially as the movie progresses. The rest of the movie takes place in the present-day setting, with the introduction of the university students heading for a snowmobile adventure during their winter break, before they get lost in the blizzard and end up in a seemingly abandoned sanatorium. The slasher-movie mode is on full display once the killing starts, as O’Brien goes all out on the no-holds-barred, savagery side of depicting these young victims being hunted by the mutants.
No Exit (2022)
Based on Taylor Adams’ 2017 novel of the same name, Damien Power embraces the familiar trapped-in-a-snowstorm setting in No Exit, detailing Darby Thorne’s (an engrossing Havana Rose Liu) recovering addict character fleeing rehab to drive to Salt Lake City. She intends to visit her mother in the hospital, only to be stopped by a local officer warning her about the interstate being temporarily closed due to the snowstorm.
The movie’s subsequent shift to a single location in and out of a visitors’ center filled with other people – among them played by Danny Ramirez, Dale Dickey and Dennis Haysbert — waiting out the storm to pass sets the ominous tone. Power builds the suspense effectively, while keeping his movie taut with airtight pacing and solid performances all around. The overall story may have been predictable, but it’s hard to deny Power’s understanding of how such a genre works by maintaining a mix of efficiency and consistent high-stakes scenarios in the single-location thriller formula.
What are your favourite stranded-in-the-snow movies? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Casey Chong
