Let It Snow (2020)

Not to be confused with any of the scores of non-Ukrainian-horror movies with the same title, this centers around a woman trapped on a desolate mountainside in Georgia (the country, not the state) being hunted by someone on a snowmobile. The movie has a couple merits - we'll get to those - but on the whole this is style over substance where the style gets old quickly. Director and co-writer Stanislav Kapralov is trying to create a modern Christmas ghost story, but he's stretching material appropriate for a short into a full length movie. By the time we get to the end, we've figured out the two or three twists the movie could take, and when we get to the final reveal, there's no way it can't be anticlimactic.

The movie, which features five significant characters and maybe twice as many bit parts, probably didn't cost an awful lot to make, but it had the resources for some realistic (and at times disturbing) make-up effects. Visually, it compares to US movies with budgets in the low seven figure range. I don't know what this cost, but I'm betting somewhere in the vicinity of "much less than that". Assuming I'm right, they managed to make this look good on a budget, even if they didn't manage to make it good. That's still something - there's solid craft here, at least.

After a brief prologue with an unseen voice narrating a sequence showing two unknown American snowboarders accidentally colliding with a young girl skiing on a slope then leaving her to die, we're introduced to Mia, played by actress Ivanna Sakhno, probably best known for playing the Sith apprentice who stabbed Sabine Wren in Ahsoka. At any rate, Mia arrives at a Georgian hotel with her boyfriend, Max (I'm not sure why we're budgeting letters here), played by Alex Hafner. They quickly meet Lali (I guess actress Tinatin Dalakishvili gets four letters), a creepy hotel clerk who warns them to stay off the infamous "Black Ridge," a mountain Max is obsessed with visiting.

Over the next fifteen or twenty agonizing minutes, they're warned away from the ridge on multiple occasions. They're told that people keep dying there. When Max goes to talk to the helicopter pilot they're hiring in the hotel parking lot, they see the body of a guy who died there the same week. They ask what happened, and the paramedics say it looks like the person might have been killed and dumped on Black Ridge. Later, the pilot tells them a little about the girl who died, including a local legend about her ghost appearing. Naturally, they decide to go anyway. Or more accurately Max decides: Mia is having doubts. But she also stumbled across an engagement ring in his luggage, so she doesn't argue too much.

Soon after, they split up, trusting in their phones to keep in touch. Almost immediately, Mia is hit by a snowmobile and knocked out. She comes to and is unable to reach Max. Eventually she locates him, only to discover it's an improbable set up. He winds up dragged away by the snowmobile, while she's left surrounded by roses (the snowmobiler has a sense for the dramatic).

For some reason she doesn't or can't call for help (we know her phone works on the mountain, because she got Max's voice mail a few scenes earlier). She goes looking for Max and is caught in an avalanche caused by the masked snowmobiler. She's eventually pulled to safety by an elderly man who takes care of her. This, we eventually learn, is the grandfather of the girl who died at the beginning (the snowmobiler is of course his child and the parent of the girl). We get a scene establishing that Lali was her aunt and is helping the snowmobiler evade capture while also trying to protect people - she doesn't want her family member caught, but she's also not on board with this whole blood debt thing.

When Mia wakes up, she realizes enough to connect the old man with what's going on but not enough to trust him. She suspects he's the snowmobiler, which is possible because said snowmobiler has remained masked this whole time (and will continue to be so until the very end). Mia goes into the wilderness alone, still looking for Max.

She also keeps running into the snowmobiler, who never closes in to finish her off. Why? Who can say? We're told the loss of the girl drove the snowmobiler crazy. The elements wear away at Mia's body and sanity. She blacks out on numerous occasions, seems to lose time, and acts irrationally. She runs into the old man again, now tied up in a bunker decorated with mementos from the killer's victims, as well as pictures of the dead girl from the beginning. The snowmobiler shows up, Mia runs and falls unconscious. Lather, rinse, repeat.

After a lot of this, Mia finds Max's corpse encased in a snowman at the top of a cliff. His arms are sticking out, and he's been posed holding the engagement ring. Mia has a mental breakdown and starts talking to him, as if he's alive. She says it's time for them to leave, and she embraces the snowman and falls off the cliff.

The killer sees all this and finally removes the mask, revealing (dramatic music) that it's the girl's mother, not the father, as the movie very clearly assumes we assumed. We get flashbacks expanding on this, but after an hour and thirty minutes of this nonsense, it all feels academic. The credits roll. The movie is over.

OR IS IT? In a mid-credits twist we see Mia wake up in the woods, having inexplicably survived her fall. She stands and bellows with rage. And... look, Ivanna Sakhno is a goddamn maestro when it comes to bellowing with rage. She's great at this. So it's a better place to end, I guess, but whatever the movie thinks it's implying - maybe that she'll become a similar bloodthirsty avenger offing tourists and keeping the ghost story alive - just kind of lands with a thud.

Sakhno is very good at conveying her character's deterioration and madness through movement. The problem is we don't really care, because the script fails to develop her or Max into remotely interesting characters, despite having plenty of time to do so. We spend around fifteen minutes with these two before they go to the mountain, and all we learn is that Max is an entitled moron. Their scenes together don't just fail to make them likeable or interesting; they fail to make them register as characters. The dialogue is strangely unnatural and phrased in ways that seem forced. I don't believe this is what occurred, but it genuinely feels as though it was written in another language then hastily translated to English. People just don't talk like this, so they register as exposition machines rather than human beings.

That's less of a problem when Mia's alone, and her character starts emerging through Sakhno's physicality. Unfortunately, the script doesn't know to capitalize on this. As Mia undergoes her ordeal, she never really does or tries much of anything. She has multiple opportunities to arm herself - there are knives in the old man's house, as well as the bunker, not to mention plenty of rocks - but at no point does she bother taking anything and trying to fight back. She doesn't attempt to build any traps, use smoke to signal for help, or find a place to hide and collect information. She just kind of lumbers from backdrop to backdrop aimlessly.

It's not that this is unrealistic: she's suffering from exposure to the elements, trauma, and shock, so it's entirely plausible she wouldn't think to do more than try to find her boyfriend in that situation. But the decision to just kind of have her behave as an observer is a missed opportunity to build Mia into someone interesting. It's not an exaggeration to say the most interesting thing she does in the entire movie is scream (she does this several times, actually).

A series of flashbacks attempts to build out her relationship with Max and explain why she's so fixated on finding him. These are certainly better than the opening bit at the hotel, but - aside from making her a bit sympathetic - there's no way anyone watching is going to give a damn about Max after he arrogantly dragged his girlfriend up a murder mountain after being warned repeatedly that it's a goddamn murder mountain. And while we understand intellectually that Mia loves him regardless, her attachment to someone that stupid and reckless undermines the sympathy the movie needs to build.

The movie's edited to resemble a dream or hallucination. In some ways, this works: you're left with the impression of coming into and out of consciousness. At the same time, this leaves the movie feeling disjointed. There are continuity leaps that feel ambiguously intentional or lazy, depending on how you want to look at it. Again, if Mia had been better developed, I think this would have connected more effectively.

As far as the holidays are concerned, this is exploring a couple different aspects of Christmas. First, there's the whole "Christmas ghost story" element I mentioned at the top. While there's nothing explicitly supernatural going on, the movie establishes there's a evolving legend about the ghost of the murdered child while also maintaining a tone appropriate for that genre. This isn't subtle about wanting you to walk away with the impression you'd seen a ghost story.

Second, there's the whole "mother and child" element connected to the killer losing her daughter at Christmas. The movie isn't subtle about this, either: there's a recurring image of the Virgin Mary with child in the hotel and the old man's hut. It's subverting the symbol, but that's of course the point. This is the dark side of a mother's love for her child, twisted into hatred and rage and turned indiscriminately against innocent bystanders. That's not a bad theme for a horror movie, but it still needed a decent movie around it to work.

The other holiday element is in the movie's title. This features several versions of the classic song. We eventually hear a recording of if being sung by the girl killed at the beginning that functions as a generic horror song (you know the drill: corrupted recording, dark surroundings, etc.). It's all very silly and generic. But, hey, it ties to Christmas, as well as the snowy landscape.

In addition to Ivanna Sakhno's physicality, the movie features solid cinematography taking advantage of the natural landscape. It's at once beautiful and frightening; the sort of place that might take your breath away literally and figuratively. But a couple strong elements doesn't make a movie. This needed to make far better use of its runtime to justify a feature length film. As it is, there's just not enough here to sustain anyone's interest. The movie becomes boring a couple minutes in and never recovers.