The feature debut by director Rob Connolly, Edge of Winter does not sizzle with any of the aesthetic boldness or narrative experimentation so often on display in first efforts. Instead, it is a rather banal, predictable thriller that never quite thrills. Despite promising genre components—and classic fictional tropes, the film is a contrived and bloodless combination of ingredients rather than a compelling cinematic ride.
Elliot Baker (Joel Kinnaman) is a volatile, hard-living and down-on-his-luck ex-logger in a provincial town in Canada. When his ex-wife and her second husband go for a cruise, they bring Elliot’s estranged sons Bradley (Tom Holland) and Caleb (Percy Hynes White), to spend a week with their father. After the boys find a shotgun under Elliot’s bed, the bored men drive off into the wilderness to shoot.
As filmmaking convention would require, the trip leads to disaster. The shooting divides the boys, as the younger Caleb loves it and the older Bradley is humiliated by it. Elliot has too much to drink, which leaves Bradley, who can’t drive, to take the wheel when a snowstorm rolls in. He pilots the vehicle into a ditch, and in order to survive the men must look for a cabin that Elliot thinks is in the area.
For its third act, the film settles into what is supposed to be a tense chamber drama as the men discover that they are not the only ones utilizing this particular backwoods hunting cabin for shelter. Elliot becomes increasingly unstable and violent as the film reaches its climax and the boys are pressed into an extraordinarily difficult calculus regarding their own survival.
The problems with the film are myriad. Most crucially, at no point does the plot ever actually garner emotional investment from the viewer. The stakes are never high: what is going to happen next is always fairly predictable, the characters never approach likability and Elliot’s downfall is a fait accompli from the opening shot. The editing and cinematography are conventional, and the script is littered with the sort of half-baked and juvenile constructions of masculinity that the rest of the world is leaving behind.
Shot mostly shot on location in a snowy forest in Ontario, Edge of Winter tries to sell itself as realist cinema, a believable descent into personal madness and violence. But the script takes realism only so far, at times straining credulity in the name of drama. Elliot’s mental breakdown is predicated on a deus ex machina beyond the scope of believability rather than upon something authentic. This is lazy filmmaking. People experience violent descents into madness for all sorts of interesting reasons, and it is a classic cinematic storyline. Such a plot device is generally used to critique societal structures or meditate upon the human condition. The fact that Connolly instead resorts to such a contrived motivation for Elliot suggests that he does not have much to say as an artist. Why make a film in the first place? If Edge of Winter could capably achieve the genre conventions of a survival thriller, then the paucity of ideas that plague its script could be forgiven, but it finally comes up short.
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