Frozen Review
By Lora Grady
Of Ice and Men
"Frozen" is about three college students abandoned on a chairlift when a ski resort closes at the end of the weekend. The lights are shut off, plunging them into darkness. They are halfway up the mountain and dangling thirty feet or more above hard-packed snow, and they realize that the resort won't reopen again until Friday. They are facing exposure, debilitating fear, and a series of harrowing choices that will lead either to rescue or death. From that brief summary, you probably already have a good idea of whether or not this is your kind of movie.
"Frozen" presents such a neat setup that it's hard to believe it hasn't been done before. Giving away too many plot points would spoil the viewing experience, but the film sets up its central conflict pretty efficiently: the three players are Joe (Shawn Ashmore, "
X-Men") and Dan (Kevin Zegers), two life-long buddies, and Dan's college girlfriend, Parker (Emma Bell). They kick off an afternoon of skiing/snowboarding at a local ski area (various bits of dialogue tell us it's somewhere in New England, but nobody's being specific) by sending Parker to charm, and ultimately bribe, the lift attendant into letting them up the mountain without buying passes. Think that's going to come back to haunt them later on? You're right.
We learn that there's some tension between Parker and Joe (the self-professed "third wheel" of the trip), that Parker's not very experienced with snowboarding, and that Joe hasn't been too successful in romantic relationships. After some bickering in the lodge as afternoon turns to evening, the three decide to head up the mountain for the proverbial "one last run" that always seems to lead to trouble. And what trouble: through a series of miscommunications and the onset of threatening weather forcing a quick shutdown of the resort, the trio winds up stranded on the lift, with nobody else in sight, and the horror of the situation begins to dawn on them.
"Frozen" is cleverly written and simply shot; it depends for the most part on the inherent stress of the characters' predicament to generate tension, and that tension is, at times, absurdly high. You really won't know where the story is headed as you're watching it, but you are likely to feel the weight of each decision that has to be faced - and to feel each blast of icy wind and gust of stinging snow as night turns to day and back to night, ice blankets the chairlift, and you're reminded that a winter mountainside becomes hostile terrain pretty quickly when the lights are off and people are stripped of their creature comforts.
This movie isn't for the faint of heart, but fans of horror and suspense are likely to have a pretty good time seeing it in the theatre. There are a few rough spots: the makeup effects are somewhat inconsistent, and emotional dialogue is sometimes accompanied by unnecessarily weighted orchestral scoring. You may also have to suspend your disbelief to fully accept some of the plot twists - but then, if you weren't willing to do that, you probably wouldn't be seeing a movie about college kids trapped on a ski lift in the first place.
