It's Really Coming Down Out There

 

It's never a good thing to watch a horror movie and wonder if the Hallmark Christmas version would be better, but when a film comes loaded with a Hallmark-ready title and Lifetime-budget CGI, it's inevitable. 

Quick Plot: Five college pals head to rich daddy's boy River's remote cabin for a New Year's celebration. As the alcohol flows, the snow comes down hard, quickly trapping them inside and shutting down the power. With no cell service, things look grim.

Thankfully (or not), med student Eden has a big old brain loaded with tricks about how to survive hypothermia. Apparently, such a process is far less fun than death. 

There's no more drinking, sleeping, Twizzlers, or fresh snowcones to be had. Instead, the group must battle their own psyches and paranoia amid the rampant hallucinations that come with, well, no sleeping or Twizzlers. 

It's a good idea for a low budget horror movie, and make no mistake: despite literal phoned (well, Zoomed)-in cameos by Patrick Fabian and hey! Hallmark favorite Jonathan Bennett, Snow Falls is not an expensive film. There's a CGI snowman that makes me wonder if both late '90s incarnations of Jack Frost were ahead of their time. Digital snow that makes Tubi originals look fancy. And so on. 

Written, directed, and co-starring Colton Tran, Snow Falls has the benefit of streaming on Amazon Prime, where I've recently watched some pretty insufferable horror movies from this decade. This one is pretty far from being what anyone would call good, but it feels less offensive than some of its peers. 

The main downside of Snow Falls is that it lacks a certain spark. The first scene suggests we're in for a batch of obnoxious young people who complain about things like seat belts, but quickly, they become less awful and more dull. We've got shy good boy River (The Passenger's Johnny Berchtold), fit Kit (played by Tran), hypochondriac Em, and her boyfriend Andy (whose main defining trait is "boyfriend"). Eden stands out for her medical knowledge and backstory involving a recently deceased mom, the latter of which seems like it's intended to go somewhere spooky or heartfelt and simply...doesn't. 

The setup of Snow Falls gives plenty of opportunity for surprise, but unfortunately, that only seems to work on its characters. The audience is always aware that any moment of hope is a hallucination. That gets old fast, even in just 80 minutes.

High Points

You know what? I learned a lot about hypothermia! That's useful!

Low Points

An 80 minute educational video about hypothermia may have been more suspenseful

Lessons Learned

When you have 11K followers, people expect to hear from you

To survive hypothermia, you have to be very, very lame

There's always a very sharp piece of furniture when tensions rise

Rent/Bury/Buy

Snow Falls is far from the worst little thriller you'll find on Prime, but it's still hard to summon any real reason to recommend it. 

Another Dose of Compliance

 

In this (deadly doll's) house, we celebrate the work of Kyle Gallner. 

Pay your respects and hop in.

Quick Plot: At 21 years old, Randy Bradley hasn't done much with his life. He quietly toils away at a dour burger joint where nobody even knows his first name. His pride gets a minor boost with the tease of a managerial promotion, but the moment he uses it to stand up to a jerk of a coworker, it all tumbles down. 

Being humiliated is one thing. Randy is used to it. Benson is not. 

Played by the always great Kyle Gallner, Benson is the kind of guy you don't notice. Older than the teenagers around him but seemingly even less ambitious, his presence barely registers until it explodes into a shooting spree, sparing only the terrified Randy Bradley.

Written by Jack Stanley and directed by Carter Smith, The Passenger is a fascinating film that toys with genre conventions in ways that constantly make the viewer wonder exactly what they're supposed to be feeling. Is Benson a mere homicidal sociopath or Randy's guardian angel? 

It's a more complicated question than you could possibly imagine. Randy, played beautifully by Johnny Berchtold, has his reasons for living in a whisper, but Benson is right in some regards: he does deserve to give himself more. But Randy is also a good enough person to see past Benson's Tyler Durden-y philosophizing for its own inconsistency.

Having recently rewatched The Ruins, I can now enthusiastically throw myself on the Carter Smith train. The Passenger is a completely different film in terms of story and tone, but when you put them together, you can see so many of Smith's unique strengths as a genre director, particularly in how he's able to draw such real but deeply layered characters without much exposition or background. He seems to have a genuine human touch with his work, and that goes a long way when exploring something horrific.

High Points

For such a lean film, there's quite a lot going on in terms of what's driving our characters, but with the setup The Passenger has, it's still fascinating that the primary story at the heart of the film is how Randy Bradley has spent the bulk of his life in the smallest way possible because of such an understandable guilt over having hurt someone. It's not the kind of emotion that would normally get this kind of treatment

Low Points

I don't know that I have any real complaints about The Passenger, so why not use this space to ask a question that always makes me mad: why isn't Kyle Gallner a bigger star? 

Lessons Learned

It takes a lot of energy to hate a seven year old

Fast food has far more character than a food court

Even the smallest public elementary school needs better security training for office staff

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Passenger is not a fun watch, but it's a beautifully done challenge of a film that explores some very human issues. Don't go in lightly, but do go in.