Snow Falls (2023)

Snow Falls is a horror movie about five teenagers who are either being killed off by supernatural snow or just hallucinating due to hypothermia and hunger. The ambiguity surrounding what's causing their deterioration is intentional; the movie being bad is presumably less so.

Okay, that was a little harsh. Snow Falls has some decent moments in it, and I need to hedge any criticism with the caveat I'm unclear how much this thing cost to put together (aside from "not very much", which is obvious). I do think it's important to consider budget when discussing movies like these, as well as what the movie was supposed to accomplish for the filmmakers. If they hoped to create something capable of attracting a following like that of The Lodge, they were way off the mark. On the other hand, if this was produced for very little money with the goal of displaying a competency with genre... I mean, it's still not a homerun, but there are a handful of good shots scattered throughout the picture, which is well enough made from a technical standpoint. There's just nothing here to win over much of anyone.

The movie starts on December 31st with five friends driving to a massive cabin owned by River's parents, who are a bit too worried about their dishes and maybe not worried enough about the fact their college-aged son is going to hang out in the mountains with some friends during a blizzard. Granted, the place has a backup generator, a fireplace, and a gas stovetop (but not gas heating, for some reason), so I guess things would have to go catastrophically wrong for it to be a problem. The movie offers some early foreshadowing through the car radio implying maybe something bigger is going on (or it could just be the usual news related to weather-related fatalities, plane crashes, and so on that we've all been conditioned to relegate to background noise). The cabin doesn't have cell phone reception, except when it does, in which case the signal is strong enough for video calls, a very normal way for people to have casual conversations with their parents and friends.

The characters arrive, drink alcohol, and hang out. Weirdly, they don't seem to be having much fun, which means we don't get all that attached to them in the introduction section. Let's go through the list. Eden (Anna Grace Barlow) is studying medicine and will eventually be the movie's main protagonist and only survivor. River (Johnny Berchtold), the last to die, is initially coded as a possible lead - he has a crush on River and cares a little too much about his parents' stuff (though, to be fair, his father seemed to imply he'd better take care of their possessions; plus his friends don't care enough early on). Kit is... er... played by Colton Tran, the movie's director, I guess? Em (Victoria Moroles) is a hypochondriac, and her boyfriend, Andy (James Gaisford), is obsessed with social media.

That night, a bit after midnight, the snowstorm knocks out the power. River checks the generator, but it's out of gas. They have the fireplace, but their wood supply is low. Still, they're not worried, since the power will likely come on within a day.

Instead, it keeps snowing. Food supplies start to run low, they run out of firewood, and they start seeing things. One of them speculates that the snow could be contaminated, and the idea takes root. Eden, the only one with useful experience, pushes back on that idea. She tells them about psychological experiments and the dangers of paranoia. She also has suggestions for staying warm in an emergency, which is honestly nice to see in a movie with this premise. This isn't a movie where coeds freeze to death in separate rooms while wearing tank tops: characters mainly keep their coats on, they try to stay together, and they use what resources they have. Can you nitpick things they don't do but should? Sure! But they don't die acting like complete idiots, aside from what hallucinations cause them to do.

Let's talk about a few of those. Kit burns his hands on the gas stove, Em cuts herself open in an attempt to remove the evil snow, River sees a living snowman, Eden hallucinates a telephone call and her dead mother, then a bunch of the characters are tricked by the snow or their own minds into freezing to death. Not Andy, though: he dies fighting with River, who reacts particularly poorly to Andy starting to chop up his parents' table for firewood. Oh, also River dumps out the gas from the car to prevent them from using in to fuel the generator, because he briefly thinks they need to die to prevent the supposed contamination from spreading.

Yeah, turns out River isn't the protagonist. He's not exactly the bad guy, either, though he comes off that way for a while, both because of the stuff above and because he hid some of the food, planning to share it with only Eden. But by the end he's basically the same mess of regret and concern as the others. Then he hallucinates Eden luring him into a hot shower. Not even Eden is immune: in addition to hallucinating the call earlier, she believes River is with her when she sits outside on the porch and is rescued at the end. Assuming she wasn't also hallucinating the rescue - the police showing up when they do seems kind of unlikely.

At any rate, the point of all this is mainly that it doesn't matter whether the danger is psychological or supernatural in nature: either way, it's capable of killing them. That's not a bad concept to hang a horror movie on, but the execution... ugh. Where to start.

First, there are the places the budget falls short where it really can't. These are mainly things like Kit's burns, Em's self-inflicted wound, and Andy's head trauma. As a self-proclaimed wimp, I'm not saying I wanted any of these sequences to be stomach-churning, but I'm betting the movie would have been better received by horror fans if these were more graphic. Personally, I was more bothered by the snow.

Sigh.

Okay, this one's a pet-peeve, so take it with a grain of salt, but the falling snow in this movie is computer-generated effect. To be fair, that's also the case with the bulk of low and mid-budget holiday movies these days (and even some big-budget productions). If you're not looking for it, you're likely to miss it, but as someone who watches way too many of these to be healthy, it looks faker than a rushed superhero movie. I'm never happy with CG snow, but in a movie where it's the central threat, it's a more substantive issue.

On top of the falling snow, there's a problem with the snow on the ground, namely that there's not enough. When they go looking for help at one point, there appears to be between three and six inches of the stuff. At this point, we're supposed to believe it's been snowing for days. As long as you go slowly, you can drive through six inches of snow pretty easily. It's not a big deal.

Yeah, I get that was out of the filmmaker's control. There's virtually no information about this online, but the IMDB Trivia section claims it was shot in six days. I can't confirm that, but... uh... it is very believable. I understand that independent and low-budget productions are often stuck with the realities of their locations and lack the luxury of reshoots or large-scale digital effects. But fair or not, it's distracting.

Of course, if the movie invests you in its characters, it can get away with stuff like bad CG and uncooperative weather. But that's just not the case here. It's not so much that the writing or direction are bad; more that there's an absence of good. There's nothing to make us like or care about these people, we don't get to have fun hanging out with them, they don't make us laugh, and when the scary stuff starts happening... for the most part it's just not scary.

That said, there are a couple moments worth calling out. Late in the movie Kit hallucinates a vampiric hand reaching out at him from the sleeve of a coat hanging in a closet. The hand itself looks like something out of a Nosferatu remake, and the moment is cleverly staged - it's a good sequence! I also thought the sequence with the snowman started well, when it was accomplished by simply moving a prop between takes (a bit with an animated CG snow monster gets a bit silly, though).

Let's talk the holidays, to the extent they apply. The first part of the movie is on New Year's, though it rarely seems like more than an afterthought. Later, on January 2nd (I think), they share resolutions to try and take their minds off what's happening. The movie's themes are mostly psychological, so presumably the season is selected as a reason they'd be free and would want to celebrate. In addition, it's not surprising to see snow around New Years, so that works out.

You could also look at the holiday as a sort of unfulfilled promise for the 20-somethings. They're looking forward to their lives, trying to define themselves, and - in the case of River - trying to start a relationship. It's a time of new beginnings, which should make what happens all the more horrifying. I'm not sure it does, but there's a good chance that was the intent.

I don't want to judge this one too harshly, in part because others already have. And, as I keep saying, there are aspects to this worth applauding. Aside from some awkward bits in the car at the beginning, this mostly looks and sounds like a movie with some money behind it. Judging by that "6-day shoot" thing (which I'm assuming is true), the miniscule cast, and the fact the director and writer/producer are credited cast members (Laura M. Young has a bit part), I'm inclined to think this was made for very little money. If that's indeed the case, it deserves credit for hiding that.

But that certainly doesn't mean you need to watch it.