Larry Fessenden, who wrote, directed and edited THE LAST WINTER (which just premiered on DVD in the UK), is one of the unsung heroes of the current American horror scene. His previous picture, WENDIGO wasn’t perfect, but it was distinctive, thoughtful and unnerving. THE LAST WINTER is in many ways a companion piece to that film, and an entry in the eco-horror genre that echoes the bleak, muted mood and deliberate pacing of certain thematically similar films of the 70’s. Even the title echoes Peter Weir’s estimable THE LAST WAVE.
“Nature is indifferent to us… The world we grew up in is changed forever. There is no way home…” Like the 70’s films it resembles, Fessenden’s film feels like a microcosm of the apocalypse. Just as in LONG WEEKEND, you get the feeling that what happens to John Hargreaves and Briony Behets represents the fate awaiting all of humanity, in THE LAST WINTER, the doom facing a small group of characters appears to be the doom facing mankind.
North Industries is a company on a mission to bring us all “one step closer to energy independence”. In this story, that entails drilling for oil in the “last untapped wilderness” – a remote location in the Arctic circle. It’s the dead of winter and a group of North Industry employees are holed up at an outpost in Alaska. Supervisor Ron Perlman is the voice of the company, stubbornly believing that the public wants what they’re doing, casually dismissing counter arguments as “global warming bullshit” and lamenting the “greenie” sent to carry out impact statements. But something is more than a little off-kilter out there in the white wilderness. Temperatures rise to unprecedented new highs (Perlman refers to this unconvincingly as a “fluke”). Ground frozen for 10,000 years begins to melt. Alarm builds as characters disappear and show up dead later on. Several members of the crew sense some kind of a presence out there. Others talk of contagion, of possible sour gas seeping from the surface.
A downbeat, environmentally aware horror film for the INCONVENIENT TRUTH era, Fessenden’s film echoes LONG WEEKEND in its depiction of nature as a wronged, vengeful, powerful force, while capturing much of the oppressive menace and wintry hopelessness of John Carpenter’s THE THING. As in that movie, THE LAST WINTER is so richly atmospheric, you can almost feel the cold. Making masterfully eerie use of sound and original score (Jeff Grace’s compositions are largely based around mournful piano melodies and integrated into the film’s evocative sound design), Fessenden finds equal parts hostility and beauty in his strikingly lensed Alaskan / Icelandic backdrops. Such is the unerring creepiness of this film from the start that it often feels like a ghost story without any actual spooks.
This is an unusually subtle 21st century horror film. The characters, most of them embarking on a one-way descent into madness, start to sense something out there, an imperceptible presence that wants them out. Fessenden believes in the old adage “less is more” and gives us beautifully composed, eerie shots that show nothing but have us looking for something. False scares and cheap jumps are absent, and the flashiest technique Fessenden employs is the startling use of flash cut, almost subliminal shots of a frozen corpse. There is a BLAIR WITCH PROJECT feel to one character’s chilling, self-filmed demise, and the dialogue is similarly full of foreboding : “I just hope this isn’t happening everywhere else”, notes someone at one point, failing to disguise the near certainty that it is.
There are fine performances all round, with standouts being familiar genre faces James Le Gros and an effectively stubborn Perlman who, even after several deaths insists that “what’s needed here is a pipeline”. The movie, like WENDIGO, is exceptionally good at suggesting rather than showing though, like that film, it offers an explicit manifestation of its horrors during the climax. While Fessenden’s unveiled creatures in the final act are treated ambiguously and nicely realized, their presence detracts somewhat from the understated build up. These overt images of the hitherto unseen “presence” recall the much-debated integration of the monster in the otherwise subtle NIGHT OF THE DEMON.
Nonetheless, the movie closes with a haunting, low key final shot that, like the similar fade-out of THE LAST WAVE, reveals an unstoppable apocalypse in motion.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
