A Long Winter

Ella Kemp4.5

Frequently breathtaking, to me. Folk always find a way to cope.

davidehrlich3.0

Andrew Haigh is a master of restraint, a talent that he’s often weaponized against his own creations to beautiful and shattering effect. “All of Us Strangers,” his most powerful feature so far, achieved its singularly cosmic force by crushing Andrew Scott’s grief-stricken gay everyman under the weight of his own shame, the sharp but glancing angle of Haigh’s direction gradually freighting the character’s regrets with the gravity of a black hole. Adapted from the Colm Tóibín novella of the same name (the rights to which Haigh reserved almost two decades ago, well before “Weekend” had first suggested that he might be a worthy steward of a famous author’s work), “A Long Winter” finds the English filmmaker a long way from home, but still on some very familiar terrain — and I don’t just mean the rugged American West, where he previously shot 2017’s “Lean on Pete.” Turning his attention to the fringes of a remote Colorado ghost town that seems adrift in a cold gray limbo between the heavens above and the world below, Haigh returns with another immaculately crafted and agonizingly repressed queer drama about the pains of self-preservation, the strength required to stand on one’s own two feet some day, and — most of all — the question of how people cope with their quiet desperation without compromising themselves to death along the way. Only this time, the director’s signature restraint does more to suffocate his protagonist than it does to set him free.Much like its closeted young hero, the first-born son of a brittle family that’s been stuck in survival mode ever since the local mine shut down, the 1951-set “A Long Winter” is both sturdy as oak and withdrawn to the point of implosion. But Mike, in stark contrast to the even more diffident leads I’ve come to expect from Haigh, quickly makes clear that he refuses to be as reined in as the film around him (which in turn makes the film around him feel all the more constrictive).Played by a resilient and clear-eyed Fred Hechinger, the enduring warmth of his performance a small miracle in a movie frigid enough to make “The Turin Horse” feel like a tropical breeze by comparison, Mike rejects the implication that he should be defined by his setting, or by how Haigh chooses to frame it. Here, his lead character isn’t dimensionalized by Haigh’s reserve so much as he’s at risk of being diminished by it. Easy as it is to root for Mike to slip out from his father’s petrified shadow and make his way to “the other side of the mountain,” as it were, Haigh’s film — despite brimming with exquisite detail and finely rendered feeling — is too snowed in to support him on that journey.~this review continues on IndieWire~

George Carmi2.5

really lovely use of landscape here. does a great job at making you feel just how expansive and frightening this winter wasteland really is. i might’ve liked this a bit more, though, had fred and ebon turned in good performances and if the movie didn’t feel 3 times its length. i just don’t think fred hechinger has it.