I’ve come to realize recently that action movies or thrillers set in extremely cold temperatures are so much better than ones set in warmer environments. I don’t know if it’s the idea of fighting off frozen extremities in addition to a human adversary that makes them superior, but in recent films like The Ice Road and Dead of Winter, or classics like The Grey, 30 Days of Night, and The Day After Tomorrow, the cold just adds a layer of danger that I respond to.
Case in point: this week’s Ice Fall, directed by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky (Hinterland, Patient Zero, The Counterfeiters), about Ani (Cara Jade Myers), a young Indigenous game warden who must join forces with a poacher named Harlan (Joel Kinnaman) to avoid a group of well-trained and well-armed criminals. That gang is in search of millions of dollars of missing cash, but it's in a plane that crashed in a frozen lake on Native American land. The ice on the lake is melting, so time to reach it is running out, even as the cold is still a huge factor in this survival tale.
The film opens with a well-executed heist, led by Drake (DeVaughn Walter Nixon), who in turn is working for crime boss Rhodes (the ever-evil Danny Huston). The heist goes off without a hitch, but the plane in which the money is stowed, on its way to an unknown location for safe keeping until the heat dies down, goes down in a storm and into the very frozen lake at the beginning of the winter season. Five months later, one of the suitcases rises to the surface, breaks through the ice, and the transmitter attached to it signals the bad guys that the money is back in play. But when Harlan finds the case during a quick round of ice fishing, he grabs the money for himself. Unfortunately, he’s fishing without a license, so Ani arrests him and takes the case of money as evidence just as the thieves show up. A gun battle ensues, and soon Ani and Harlan are running away, with Harlan being the only one who knows the location of the sunken plane.
The film does more than your average actioner in letting us know a bit about these characters. For example, one of the robbers (Martin Sensmeier), a Native man, has found God since the crime and isn’t interested in retrieving the cash and doesn’t want to be associated with this crime at all. Harlan has been living off the grid since his wife and daughter died, something many of the locals know about since his wife was also Indigenous (and many blame him for her death). Meanwhile, Ani is seen by many as a sellout to her people because she is part of local law enforcement, but she has very sound reasons for becoming a game warden. The local politics are complicated for some and fairly simple for others, especially one of the local elders (played by the late Graham Greene in one of his last roles).
The point I was making about cold-weather action films is made even more clear by this movie. Ice Fall is not a great movie by any definition, but the frozen feel of this work makes things seem more urgent and deadly. At one point, Harlan has just fallen into the ice and after being pulled out, realizes he can’t feel his extremities, which makes walking long distances in a hurry quite a problem. Kinnaman is his usual stoic, quiet self, but he wears his guilt and pain on his face, and he’s quite convincing. Myers (who had a sizable role in Killers of the Flower Moon) is a great rediscovery here, and obviously, veterans Huston and Greene are as reliable as frost bite and twice as intense. You can do a lot with the cold when you’re shooting a crime drama, and Ice Fall is proof of that, reminding us that snow and wind can sometimes cover up more than footprints.
The film is now available on digital and On Demand.
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