Snowman never comes to life

Michael Fassbender in The Snowman. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The Snowman is an awful film on just about every level, but it masks its incompetence by being largely boring and dull. It’s just a way of wasting two hours of one's existence, watching poor Michael Fassbender mope around a very snowy Oslo searching for one of the least interesting serial killers in cinema history. It's a movie that just happens, it exists and it ends with no measurable effect on the viewer's outlook on life.

A lot of strange decisions were conjured to create The Snowman. Making the movie heavily centered around the titular beings of ice, snow, coal, carrots, and leftover winter clothing is among the more notable ones. The snowmen in this movie are little tokens left by the serial killer after he's abducted or murdered someone, designed to be ominous and foreboding. Except, well, snowmen don't really work as images of horror. They're beings of snow that just stand around waiting to melt, their horror derived more out of an existential terror than a more primal fright. Perhaps a field of snowmen could be frightening, a phalanx of creatures built of ice and snow with mean dark eyes and coal frowns… although just typing that sentence still makes them sound silly. If an army of snowmen can't produce any sense of fear, a single snowman won't succeed in that task.

So why does the killer design these snowmen in the first place? It's revealed in an opening sequence as a result of a traumatic childhood moment. It's not a competently executed sequence, with a poorly executed twist with no real motivation provided to the viewer. And that's not the only moment in which The Snowmen opts to keep what should be important information away from the viewers. Suspects are tossed out and in not because of any real detective work from Fassbender (playing a detective named Harry Hole) and his partner (played by Rebecca Ferguson). Rather, there's some unseen internal logic that at one moment makes J.K. Simmons a suspect before moving on to some other bloke until the real killer is revealed. There's also an undercooked subplot about Fassbender's ex (Charlotte Gainsbourg), along with unnecessary backstory involving Val Kilmer that would tie in cleaner with Ferguson's story if the movie had a stronger narrative connection. The Snowman is really more of a series of plot holes cobbled together into a thin story, which isn’t surprising considering around 15-percent of the script wasn’t actually shot, per director Tomas Alfredson.

Hypothetically the additional amount of footage would have given The Snowman more time to provide those clues so the audience can parse out the killer’s identity. Not that it's all that difficult to figure it out, but that isn't because of any clues or hints provided by the filmmakers. Rather, the resolution comes from knowledge of the genre that makes the whole reveal obvious; the movie itself just says it’s this guy without any legitimate clues, let alone any logic behind it. A clever movie can take advantage of audience knowledge and use it against viewers, but this movie is nowhere near clever enough to pull off such a feat. The killer is the killer, and the killer is disposed of with a lame Deus ex machina because the filmmakers opted not to make it properly climactic or thrilling. It just sort of ends, because everything has to end at some point and the movie couldn't figure out a better way of getting away from itself.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 119 minutes

Genre: Crime

Ask Away

Target audience: Criminal procedural fans and people who like snowmen.

Take the whole family?: It gets graphic enough to bother kids, so make it a date night if you decide to go out...

Theater or Netflix?: Or just don't go out at all to see it.

Does this movie do anything right?: By name the cast is OK. Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and J.K. Simmons all have strong acting chops, and Val Kilmer has a couple of great performances under his belt from like 25 years ago. Figures that this movie couldn't do anything with the cast it had.

Watch this instead?: Insomnia does a lot of what The Snowman tries to do, but way, way better. There's also the animated Snowman movie from the 1980s that is just splendid.