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QUIET
EARTH.US The Rating: 8 out of 10
This movie was really reminiscent of John Carpenter's The Thing which
I loved, and I have to say I've been a Ron Perlman fan ever since
City of Lost Children. So basically you take these two elements together,
throw in a great storyline, some great acting, an incredible ending,
mix it all together... and you have a solid 8. Go see it! It's great!
Larry, please, make The Last Winter part 2! Link
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NEW YORK TIMES By MANOHLA DARGIS September 19,
2007
That
Red on White Is Blood on Snow
Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film “The
Last Winter,” crawling through the hallways and howling into
the dread night. Set in the blinding white beauty of the Alaskan wilderness
(though mostly shot in Iceland), the story brings us close to a small
research team scouting the crude commercial possibilities for a large
oil concern. Under the corporate rubric of “energy independence,”
the company hopes to drill through the permafrost, a scheme that promises
shivers that have nothing to do with the cold. Ah, but the ice is
melting, melting, which makes the truth as inconvenient as it is deadly.
It’s amazing what you can do with a low budget, an expansive
imagination and a smooth-moving camera. (A fine cast helps.) An heir
to the Val Lewton school of elegantly restrained horror, wherein an
atmosphere of dread counts far more than a bucket of blood and some
slippery entrails, the director Larry Fessenden is among the most
thoughtful Americans working on the lower-budget end of this oft-abused
and mindlessly corrupted genre.
Apocalyptic in title and tone, “The Last Winter,” written
by Robert Leaver and Mr. Fessenden, breathes fresh air into a stale
setup (an isolated group gone stir crazy or something) by insisting
that our everyday horrors aren’t a matter of arid news reports
but of feverishly real, terrifying life.
And death, of course: for the wind-battered and sunburned team running
the outpost, debased life will soon beget anguished death, drop by
bloody drop. But first there are signs and visions, cawing black birds
and mysteriously thundering hooves.
During the day the team’s lead science researcher, Hoffman (James
Le Gros), stares into the surrounding wild whiteness like a writer
searching for words, for anything, in front of a never-ending and
terrifyingly empty sheet of paper. At night he slips into the obliterating
darkness with a company true believer, Abby (Connie Britton), who
once offered shelter to the team’s boisterous leader, Pollack
(Ron Perlman), a comic-strip villain with a cigar and a mouthful of
gravel and nonsense.
There are others wandering the corridors, oiling the machinery, filling
in the blanks and ably hitting their marks: a mechanic named Motor
(the reliable Kevin Corrigan); another scientist, Elliot (a very fine
Jamie Harrold); a stray lamb, Maxwell (Zach Gilford); a smiling cook,
Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah); and a mystery man with piercing eyes, Lee
(Pato Hoffmann), who seems to know more than anyone else but doesn’t
ask and never tells.
Each adds another part of the story with a laugh, a gesture or even
louder silences. Twisting his lips and adjusting his glasses, Elliot
puts Hoffman into an even more eccentric light than he might otherwise
appear, undermining our faith in the very character (the lead, perhaps
the hero) toward whom the film seems to be nudging us.
The question of Hoffman’s role, as well as of his trustworthiness,
hovers over the story, leaking into the camp hallways like a gas.
With his soft, youthful face glazed red-brick and partly obscured
by his beard, Mr. Le Gros invests the character with sympathy without
making him especially likable. There’s something closed off
about this man, despite his nocturnal visits and talks with Abby,
as if he’d already surrendered part of himself to some other
force. He’s the first to sound the alarm, though it isn’t
initially clear if his early warnings, delivered with mad-prophet
quiet and ominously scribbled research notebooks, mean that he’s
the canary in the coal mine or the cat in the birdhouse. Our desire
for a hero is as unsettling as it is instructive.
Against the vast white of “The Last Winter,” every man
and woman eventually looks like a blot on the landscape, like a mistake.
Working with the Icelandic cinematographer G. Magni Agustsson, Mr.
Fessenden makes great expressive use of his natural canvas and its
negative space, playing with the depth of field so that the whiteness
either seems to stretch on forever or suddenly flatten, at times turning
these fully dimensional human figures into silhouetted cutouts.
This metaphorically resonant visual trick works beautifully for Mr.
Fessenden’s genre and political purposes, adding pathos and
urgency to the creeping unease. Here, when someone’s nose begins
to bleed, it isn’t long before that drip turns into a gusher.
LINK
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SCREEN DAILY by Patrick Z McGavin 9/22/06
The fourth feature from idiosyncratic American independent director
Larry Fessenden, The Last Winter expertly conflates the psychological
dread fundamental to the horror genre, broadening it out into a deeper,
existential malaise about the disintegration of civilisation.
A story about the madness that engulfs a disparate group at a remote
Alaskan drilling site, the movie is clearly influenced visually and
thematically by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and John Carpenter’s
version of The Thing. It is marred by some didactic passages about
ecological and corporate plunder, but otherwise this unnerving allegory
on greed and conquest was one of the major discoveries at Toronto.
Admittedly, it is a difficult film to market: like the works of George
Romero, The Last Winter is an intellectual horror movie that mourns
the loss of humanity. The right US distributor should find a way to
take advantage of the movie’s strong visual qualities, excellent
cast and probing content to reach a discerning audience. Internationally,
the film’s topical concerns about the devastating environmental
consequences of developing alternate energy sources carry a strong
contemporary relevance.
A team of scientists and engineers is dispatched by North Industries,
an American energy conglomerate, to a remote outpost of the Alaska
frontier for a top-secret drilling expedition. Fessenden expertly
draws out the group dynamics, quickly establishing the tension between
Hoffman (LeGros), the scientist assigned to assess the environmental
impact, and Pollock (Perlman), the entrepreneurial, driven drill leader
who is highly sceptical of Hoffman’s credentials. Their rivalry
is exacerbated by their shared sexual history with Abby (Britton),
who is now sleeping with Hoffman.
But the crew’s private drama is soon replaced by strange, unexplainable
actions at their command centre. Abnormally high temperatures imperil
the group’s ability to import the heavy machinery required for
the drill; later Maxwell (Gilford), the least experienced member,
goes missing and turns up at the base hours later but subject to increasingly
bizarre behaviour.
Soon it becomes clear that something is dangerously amiss, as the
group’s severe isolation and the increasing presence of some
primordial force slowly begins their collective unraveling. Maxwell,
is the first to die but not the last, as fellow workers succumb to
a variety of demises, from a plane crash to suffocating each other.
Eventually Hoffman and Pollock undertake a perilous quest to get help
that evolves into their mysterious and unnerving confrontation with
the malevolent force.
The Last Winter is an unusual work, an art movie that frightens and
disrupts. Fessenden’s tone is to effectively underplay the horror,
as the stillness and foreboding sense of rupture contribute to the
developing panic.
It loses a little something in the final act, when Fessenden finally
unveils the ghostly, spectral presence that haunts the group, but
by then it is governed by a sharp, punishing and dismayingly believable
pessimism about the human condition that instils fright in its audience.
Shooting in Iceland, Fessenden uses the blindingly white snowbound
landscapes to signal an inescapable sense of doom and terrifying regret.
Working with cinematographer G Magni Agustsson, he deploys sinuous,
vertiginous camera movements and vertical, high overhead shots that
underline the emphatic break between civilisation and nature: the
The Last Winter’s power is in how actions and events are felt
as much as they are seen.
The effects work is strong, presenting the crew’s nemesis in
two guises: a massive, almost alien figure; and a spectral, ghost-like
herd of deer which charge in huge formations and stomp a couple of
victims to death.
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FILM
COMMENT by John Anderson
Larry Fessenden works with horror and irony the way Giacometti worked
with clay—paring away at conventions, shaving matters down to
their starkest. This might not bode well for his hapless characters’
physical welfare, but it does preserve the dread.
Fessenden’s Habit (97) was a Looking for Ms. Goodbarwith fangs,
and one of the first films to cocktail shake sex, blood, and HIVinto
a horror context; Wendigo (01), a chiller rooted in Indian lore about
transmogrification, turned the seemingly placid terrain of snowy upstate
New York into a realm of gothic foreboding.
It’s the second of these that echoes in Fessenden’s latest,
The Last Winter, which is set in Alaska, and in which, unlike any
of its obvious progenitors in Arctic creep—from The Thingto
Zero Kelvin—the problem with the frosty landscape is that it
isn’t cold enough. Centered on a group of oil prospectors, it
is invested with a fear not of the supernatural, but the natural:
the world is warming and as it thaws, something angry and septic is
being unleashed out of the long-dormant, no-longer-perma permafrost.
The director, working from a script by himself and Robert Leaver,
finds a lode of Hitchcockian potential out of doors, where snow makes
a nightly flight across the stark white light of G. Magni Agustsson’s
camera and where the more delusional members of the North Industries
drilling team see phosphorescent herds of antlered phantoms stampeding
through the gloom. Unexplained nosebleeds. Naked blue-white corpses
with their eyes plucked out. Madness. Team leader Pollack (Ron Perlman),
the quintessential short-fused, unmanageable manager, has quite a
few problems on his hands.
The principal one, he thinks, is his polar opposite, Hoffman (James
LeGros), an environmental activist and, significantly, Pollack’s
physio-aesthetic rebuttal. Hoffman, who is there to monitor the ethically
dubious North company, is emblematic of economy and conservation—he
lacks the enormous resources, shall we say, of a Pollack, but has
done as much as he can with what he has. (Think Richard Dreyfuss in
Jaws.) Pollack, meanwhile, is ignorant, avaricious, and wastefully
huge (think . . . the United States?). And there’s something
larger than both of them, and far more dangerous, out there in the
Great White North.
A lifelong New Yorker, Fessenden—whose sideline acting career
has included playing an emergency-room patient strapped to a gurney
in Bringing Out the Dead—doesn’t seem overly fond of the
great outdoors. He finds in the tundra’s poverty of physical
detail something vaguely corrupt. Characters often float in white,
negative space, and the varied, always-fluid shooting suggests a searching
for something to grasp hold of.
Fessenden has been long producing work by maverick filmmakers, often,
but not always, in the horror genre (Douglas Buck’s 2006 remake
of Sisters, for instance, but also Kelly Reichardt’s 1994 River
of Grass, in which Fessenden played the lead). What he brings to his
own film is an increasingly confident, collagist instinct with style
and camera movement, a marriage of the visual with the visceral. No
one comes away from films like Saw and Hostel thinking much about
the lighting or the transitions, but even though The Last Winter has
a certain immediacy, it also has a cumulative richness born of both
terror and technique, plus a juxtaposition of interpersonal, indoor
relationships against an ethereal, frigid void that stands in for
the entirety of a miserable, exploited, and pissed-off planet. The
Last Winter isn’t a message movie per se, but the inconvenient
truth of the matter is that Fessenden, as he did with Habit’s
post-AIDS vampire treatment, has found something profoundly, metaphysically
scary within the facts and figures of global warming.
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EYE
WEEKLY - Adam Nayman 
The Last Winter is a perfect compliment to The
Host: both are potent eco-horror movies featuring vengeful, metaphorical
manifestations of the dangers of environmental neglect. But where
Bong Joon-Ho’s wildly entertaining crowd-pleaser posits a solution
to pollution, Larry Fessenden’s slyly allusive account of group
of oil-mongers fending off madness and malevolent Earth spirits in
the Arctic (shades of The Thing and The Shining, and, pointedly, The
Birds) builds mournfully towards total apocalypse. The film feels
a logical extension of the director’s previous hell-hath-no-fury-like-mother-Nature-scorned
masterpiece Wendigo (2002), and, in its odd blend of ellipticism and
direct allegory, it’s probably the closest an American director
will ever come to making a Kyoshi Kurosawa movie. Fessenden says he
wants to make “B-movies with A-ideas in them,” and he’s
succeeded astonishingly. Link
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NEW
YORK MAGAZINE — David Edelstein
CRITIC'S
PICK
Alaska also kills
a lot of unwitting people in writer-director Larry Fessenden’s
unnerving global-warming ghost picture The Last Winter. Like his Wendigo,
the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and
angered by human disrespect—the old Indian-graveyard paradigm,
as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie. The setting
is the satellite office of an oil company—set in the middle
of frigid, blinding white blankness. A company geologist (the intensely
likable, underused James LeGros) has grave concerns about the melting
permafrost, but the boss (Ron Perlman in one of his entertaining blowhard
turns) puts profit (and authority) before all—even after members
of the team begin dropping dead from some nameless terror and getting
their eyes picked out by ravens. There’s something under that
permafrost, encased for millions of years, now awake and pissed-off.
The Last Winter was shot in northern Iceland and Alaska, and despite
some too-explicit imagery in the final moments, the claustrophobia-to-psychosis
continuum is harrowingly fluid. Link
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THE
VILLAGE VOICE -
Nathan Lee,
September
18th, 2007 12:04 PM
The Winter of Major Discontent:
See Larry Fessenden's latest and you'll never complain about flurries
again
Set at the base
camp of a corporate expedition to establish an oil-mining operation
in the Alaskan Arctic circle, The Last Winter is one of those ghost
stories concerned with an accursed house built atop ancient burial
grounds— except here the house is civilization itself, and the
angry spirits are those of ancient plants and animals rising from
the chthonic sludge of crude oil. Mother Earth taking revenge for
a localized intrusion is one way to parse this canny conceptual horror
film, and one way to account for what appears to be the rampage of
demonic CGI caribou. Another way to see it is as a fable of speculative
evolution: This is what happens when our time on the planet is up;
this is, literally, the last winter of humankind.
The latest from independent fright-flick auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit,
Wendigo) is careful not to explain the exact nature of its mounting
crises: strange phenomenon at the horizon, the onset of madness and
suicide among the crew, vehicular malfunction, psychological meltdowns,
crows pecking the eyes out of nude popsicle corpses. Fessenden executes
his ambiguities with great precision of mood and atmosphere, maximizing
the unfathomable dimensions of his white-on-white wasteland, the claustrophobic
interiors of the base camp, and the perks of a far larger production
than he's accustomed to, milking those helicopter shots for all they're
worth.
Ever a resourceful director of actors, his human touch falters somewhat
in the rote psychodrama that pits the ego of a corporate blowhard
(Ron Perlman) against the conscience of an environmental consultant
(James LeGros), then triangulates the two in a jealous love triangle
with a scientist (Connie Britton) of vague motives. But it's the imaginative
background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action,
that counts—and unnerves—in this most chilling of global-warming
movies. LINK
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L.A.
DAILY NEWS by Bob Strauss, September 21, 2007
Winter' will scare
you stiff
It's a 'Winter' warning-land
Far and away the scariest movie of the year - and certainly the smartest,
"The Last Winter" delivers a much more frightening warning
about global warming than any superstar-hosted documentary.
Consistently chilling (no, that's not a pun), with crisp, haunting
visuals and sound character relationships, this latest work from Larry
Fessenden ("Wendigo") proves that low-budget, indie horror
films can not only be about something important but are at their best
when doing so.
The film was shot with an old master's sense of composition, space
and the magical power of what and what not to show by the young cinematographer
G. Magni Agustsson in his native Iceland. Most of it takes place at
a remote Alaskan energy company outpost in late winter. Plants are
poking up through the thinning snow, rain falls, and carnivorous crows
are coming back to roost much too early. The permafrost is melting,
undermining the ice roads commonly used to truck goods in and out
of Arctic oil country - and releasing God-knows-what that's been frozen
in the ground for untold thousands of years.
Gruff company honcho Ed (Ron Perlman) flies back to the little collection
of sheds and Quonset huts after some time south at headquarters. Jovial
but intimidating, Ed is unhappy to find that the two environmentalists
the corporation hired to make an impact study are sure that temperatures
are rising too fast to make oil drilling in the area ecologically
safe - or probably even feasible. Ed is even less pleased to discover
that his former lover Abby (Connie Britton) has taken up with furry
tree-hugger James (James LeGros).
The two men inevitably lock horns. And as things grow more and more
dire out on the tundra, their arguments come to represent different
philosophies and interpretations of the natural crisis that threatens
to engulf them.
This may sound cerebral, but it's played out with rising visceral
terror. Something - sour gas emissions from an old well maybe, but
probably far worse - starts affecting everybody, both mentally and
bodily. People run naked into the frigid wilderness at night (it may
technically be getting warm, but it sure ain't warm enough for that).
Tough guys wet their beds. Was that the wind, or did a herd of ghost
elk just stampede by?
"Last Winter" leaves much to the imagination, but not in
the incoherent manner of most modern horror films. While Fessenden
definitely proposes that something's going very screwy with the world,
his movie shrewdly suggests that the exact nature of the Earth's counterattack
may well be unfathomable. What we don't know, what we don't want to
know, what we can't figure out in time; these are the true demons
stalking "The Last Winter."
And they frightened me to death. LINK
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VARIETY - Dennis Harvey
9/19/06
After watching
mankind wreck her handiwork, Mother Nature's vengeance shifts from
global-warming-slow to horror-movie-swift in "The Last Winter."
Most physically expansive feature to date by Larry Fessenden sports
the virtues of his prior efforts ("Habit," "Wendigo"),
which are also their commercial limitations -- i.e. an emphasis on
character dynamics, slow-burning tension and offbeat narrative rather
than the usual genre checklist of monster sightings, false scares
and gory deaths. U.S.-Iceland co-prod is an imperfect but compelling
thriller that will probably fare best in ancillary -- a pity, since
its wide-open-space compositions cry for the bigscreen.
Stark Alaskan setting (exteriors were shot both there and in Iceland)
and paranoid atmosphere recall "The Thing," as a crew similarly
shacked up in blandly functional, claustrophobic live-work quarters
gradually come undone in the face of an unknown, largely unseen enemy.
In this case, they're a team sent by North Industries to prepare for
oil extraction from the hitherto protected Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. Desperate for "energy independence," the government
is clearly entwined with corporate interests. But to put a good face
on things they've allowed two free-agent "Greenies" -- esteemed
ecological watchdog/author James Hoffman (James Le Gros) and his assistant
Elliot (Jamie Harrold) -- to do a environmental impact study before
drilling begins. The principled James isn't about to just let commerce
go its merry way. He was at the Kuwaiti oil fires (glimpsed utilizing
clips from Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness") and the
Exxon Valdez spill, and fears consequences at least as disastrous
here -- already, unseasonably warm temperatures are creating logistical
problems, and there are signs that the permafrost is melting.
His suspicions that there is seriously "something off" are
treated as wacko and a needless obstacle by macho, hot-tempered team
leader Pollock (Ron Perlman), who's just returned from five weeks
at corporate headquarters. Nor is Pollock's mood lightened by discovering
that in his absence, second-in-command Abby (Connie Britton) has shifted
her warm bodily allegiance from his bed to James'. Hoffman's foreboding
and Pollock's obstinacy each gain in collision-ready force as a series
of mystifying events occur. Communication and power go haywire, cutting
the inhabitants off from outside help. Young intern Maxwell (Zachary
Gilford) goes missing, and when he is found at the site of a 20-year-old
test drilling, he has been traumatized to near-catatonia by some encounter
he can't articulate. His freak-out presages a series of illogical
behaviors, inexplicable health problems and disturbing accidents that
start whittling the station's human population down.
Horror fans used to more conventional material may find buildup too
slow, supernatural aspects too restrained, and the final payoff too
vague and not ghastly enough. (Most harrowing scenes are realistic
perils, like one figure's sudden plunge through thin ice into freezing
waters.) But "Last Winter" succeeds precisely where most
contempo horror films cut corners, in creating credible characters
whose fate we come to dread amidst situations that reel out of control
degree by methodical degree.
G. Magni Agustsson's lensing is a great assist, as it makes the arctic
landscape a still, merciless menace toward the frail intruders' well-being.
Music is used very sparingly, with astute wider deployment of Anton
Sanko's ambient soundscapes. Solid cast is headlined by Perlman in
assertive familiar form as a bullying but not unsympathetic he-man.
But burden of conviction here falls on the always excellent Le Gros,
who in a rare lead registers all the intelligent unease that the increasingly
far-fetched tale needs for suspension of viewer disbelief. Link
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FANGORIA
- Michael Gingold 
7/18/07
What a pleasure
it has been to watch the development of writer/director Larry Fessenden’s
career, as his films have slowly gained in scope while maintaining
an intensely personal vision, exploring deep themes while succeeding
on a pure genre level. THE LAST WINTER is his biggest film yet in
both scale and thematic ambition, tackling the hot-button theme of
global warming with an approach that favors dramatic impact over didacticism.
Only those who sit down already inclined to feel like they’re
going to be preached to could find fault with it; the rest will enjoy
a movie packed with atmosphere and a chilly feeling only partially
due to the Alaskan setting.
The wilds of that northern state is where a small team is prepping
the site of an impending oil-drilling operation as the story begins.
Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), head of the operation, will brook no interruptions,
and isn’t especially happy about the arrival of James Hoffman
(James LeGros), who’s there to prepare an environmental impact
statement. Having witnessed other disastrous example of people’s
negative effect on ecosystems, Hoffman is already inclined to deliver
bad news to Pollack, and soon finds that rising temperatures are posed
to throw roadblocks in the team’s way (literally; the lack of
subzero conditions means that the “ice roads” necessary
to transport equipment can’t be established).
Meanwhile, nature begins to strike back in more direct albeit initially
subtle ways. The environment seems to be having a deleterious effect
on the team’s minds, starting with Maxwell (Zachary Gilford),
a young worker who goes off on a scouting trip and doesn’t return.
Others in the group begin suffering from mental and physical debilitation,
and Hoffman starts to wonder: Is it the result of “sour gas”
(hydrogen sulfide from deep in the Earth seeping up due to the melting
of the permafrost), or something a little more paranormal in nature?
One thing’s for sure: Pollack’s sour mood at what he sees
as Hoffman’s meddling isn’t helped by the fact that the
newcomer is bedding his assistant and former lover Abby (Connie Britton).
The interpersonal conflicts and signs of impending doom are played
out against a stark background of marvelously foreboding locations
(filmed in Iceland), and Fessenden employs both tight close-ups and
wide vistas to emphasize the characters’ isolation. The script
he wrote with Robert Leaver maintains a level of drama and characterization
that holds the attention throughout, even before any of the horror
elements come into play. As in Fessenden’s previous film, the
marvelous family-breakdown chiller WENDIGO, the filmmaker engages
our sympathy for, or at least understanding of, everyone on screen,
and while his own stance on the subject of global warming (a phrase
which he smartly uses only once in the dialogue) couldn’t be
clearer, he avoids making Pollack an obstinate monster and Hoffman
an environmental knight in shining armor. The former is a man devoted
to progress and a job well done who truly believes he’s serving
his country by providing homegrown energy sources, while there are
suggestions that Hoffman has let his activism curdle into unreasonable
obsession.
Everyone on screen, in fact, develops a genuine personality, and the
performances are first-rate across the board. With his protagonists
so well-established, Fessenden mercilessly tightens the screws in
the second half, as the landscape’s rebellion against those
who would despoil it becomes increasingly direct. There are a couple
of great jump-out-of-your-seat jolts, but for the most part the director
develops an eerie intensity that builds to a boil and doesn’t
let up for the entire last act. It’s not giving too much away
to reveal that the spirit of the Wendigo makes a return appearance,
and while THE LAST WINTER employs the most expansive special FX yet
in a Fessenden film, he uses them judiciously so that they don’t
overwhelm the narrative. Even when he stages a plane crash, his focus
remains on the destructive results on the ground, rather than the
spectacle.
Although Fessenden’s movies have always looked good even on
their smallest budgets, THE LAST WINTER (his first feature in widescreen)
contains his most striking visuals yet, as he has teamed with cinematographer
G. Magni Agustsson to create exterior environments of white desolation
and confined interiors increasingly suffused in threatening darkness.
Just as crucial to the movie’s success are Jeff Grace’s
music and Anton Sanko’s eerie ambient soundscapes, which help
turn the setting into an antagonist of its own. Yet even if the environment
becomes something of a villain, its actions, like those of the humans
occupying it for just a short time, are justified by the situation.
THE LAST WINTER makes an impact statement of its own: Without preaching,
it puts an up-to-the-minute spin on the traditional horror-movie lesson
that it’s not wise to tamper with Mother Nature. Link
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PREMIERE
by Aaron Hillis (posted 9/21/07)
An indie auteur whose creative integrity is easy for cinephiles to
get behind, actor-filmmaker Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has become
a sort of heir apparent to American horror mavericks like George Romero
and Larry Cohen, in that each of his films — unlike the artless
gore-fests that blight the genre today — is a richly drawn,
ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful.
Fessenden's latest and most polished production to date presents a
northern Alaska–set eco-cautionary terror tale, in which the
villain might be a physical manifestation of an angry environment
itself — is it that humans are actually the monsters and become
a target of planetary vengeance for global warming?
Conservatives and Al Gore haters are seeing red now, but the only
thing you shouldn't be scared of is Fessenden's progressive agenda,
since both sides of this so-called partisan issue are fairly represented
in the film's complex humanizations. Isolated at an arctic outpost
owned by Big Oil, an advance team exploring drilling potential is
led by blowhard skipper Pollack (a pitch-perfect Perlman), a steadfast
company man who is entirely irked by the presence of environmental
impact surveyor Hoffman (an equally compelling Le Gros) — and
not just because the latter has been shacking up with Pollack's next-in-command
Abby (Connie Britton). Manly clashes ensue, their dinnertime debates
punctuated by iconic news footage: clips from the Exxon Valdez spill,
the Kuwaiti oil fires, busy weathermen and the like, each image a
talking point as if healthy chatter were enough to turn off this apocalypse-in-waiting.
When the permafrost starts melting, ghostly winds kick up something
fierce, and a crewmember turns up dead and naked in the snow, everyone
begins succumbing to unseen forces (or is it their collective psychological
breakdown?), and a wicked atmosphere of claustrophobia materializes
through Fessenden's cunning sense of widescreen spatiality: nightmarish
empty corridors and elegantly swirling aerials ominously gazing down
from the skies. This is filmmaking both gorgeous and deeply unsettling.
The inability to go home again is the inconvenient truth at the heart
of Fessenden's story, and his passion/frustration is so palpable that
he nearly loses his footing by making the wrong thing literally tangible:
the ambiguous enemy itself. The film offers the director's first foray
into CGI, but although it's used sparingly, the last-act unearthing
of an antlered, semi-transparent creature is diminishingly literal-minded
in the same way the final shot is rightfully so: a confused and regretful
survivor walks out into seasonably inexplicable rain, standing trembling
beside a gas-guzzling SUV. It's blunt, yes, but should an emotional
message of worldwide alarm be anything less than so? LINK
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THE
NEW REPUBLIC by Stanley Kauffmann
The
world's energy problems have been winding through films, one way or
another, at least since The China Syndrome in 1979. The Last Winter
is fundamentally on this subject, but its focus is unusual. The film
is set in a station along an Alaskan pipeline, a station of some size
and comfort where a group of men and a few women keep watch. The subject
of energy in this case becomes a matter not primarily of economics
and politics but of personal conditions--a relatively few people clumped
together in the middle of immense emptiness.
An oil rig in mid-ocean is the immediate comparison, but the oil-rig
crew has the limitation and (as it turns out) the blessing of never
leaving their station. These people in Alaska have phones and computers
and video, but they are surrounded by space that they must continually
explore--three hundred and sixty degrees of snow that only at first
seems static, arctically pastoral.
The screenplay is by Robert Leaver and the experienced director Larry
Fessenden. This was my first encounter with Fessen- den's work, despite
his reputation for high-level scare films, and very quickly indeed
it is clear that he is not any kind of exploitation maven. He is gifted,
knowledgeable, keen--possibly a bit canted in his choice of materials
but an authentic, serious film-maker. More: he establishes these points
less by the vistas of immensity, although they are stunning, than
by the way he handles the corridors and rooms and doorways within.
The oil station begins early to remind us of the spaceship in 2001.
The station is (yes) stationary, and the space outside is not super-cosmic,
merely incredible, but again the people within are bound together
by more than physical proximity.
The story, which has mostly to do with the authority of the chief
and with one of the women, is adequate but is only the means of dealing
with the themes. What really happens here is that, while the story
is going on, the real conflict is between the space outside and the
diminutive human beings within it. Eventually this conflict has a
dire effect on one of the crew, and consequences follow. Mentions
recur throughout of world matters like global warming, but the film
is really about a set of specific human circumstances that follow
from those huge matters.
Well, up to a point. Now comes some shaded news. Around two-thirds
of the way through the film, a severe accident occurs at the station,
and The Last Winter suddenly shifts from the subjects above to a much
more usual drama of physical survival in dangerous conditions. The
radios and phones go out, people get hurt, the chief and one of the
crew set out on snowmobiles for the nearest station, twenty-five miles
away. The film's whole tone shifts--from subtle mystery to blunt drama.
The new tone is scarily handled, but it is a lesser film. Apparently
the writers felt that the natural conclusion of the larger drama they
had begun would take too long and would not be vivid enough. So they
threw in the accident--tingly but a chromatic transposition.
Fessenden, who is his own editor, has splashed in from time to time
some glimpses of a character's thoughts or fears or past or future,
all of which help to maintain the atmosphere of overview that carries
most of the picture. The cast is certainly adequate, especially the
chief, played by Ron Perlman. Decades ago I used to see Perlman in
avant-garde drama Off-Broadway. Time and adventure have now brought
him to gruff authority in the midst of the Alaskan wild.
And that brings up the last fascinating point. It is not Alaska. The
picture was shot in Iceland. The cinematographer, G. Magni Ágústsson,
is Icelandic. If the fact that this is his native country helped him
with his exterior lighting, it is certainly a boon. But his interiors
are at least as good, subtly lit, precise. Once again Ágústsson
proves that first-class cinematography is now international. LINK
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CINEMATICAL.COM
by Christopher Campbell
In a spaceship,
in an underwater vessel or in an Arctic or Antarctic station, some
of the best science fiction takes place in an isolated setting. More
precisely, such locations are the convention of the narrower genre
of sci-fi horror, in which remote environments combined with tight,
claustrophobic spaces are perfect for the unleashing of our worst
fears. This is, of course, obvious to any viewer, who recognizes these
are places difficult or impossible to escape or be rescued from. But
more importantly these settings allow for psychological conflicts
that parallel, heighten or even overshadow the genre's typical conflicts
with aliens, sentient computers or supernatural beings.
Take Larry Fessenden's latest film, The Last Winter, which is set
in an Arctic station and follows all the rules of the sci-fi horror
genre, while almost completely leaving out the physical conflict.
Yes, it features a supernatural threat, but it doesn't need one, because
the film works so brilliantly as simply a psychological mood piece.
In most of these kinds of films, the creature or villain is the pay-off
for the audience that seeks some sort of spectacle, or at least some
material baddie to make for a cinematically appropriate, externally
battled climax. In The Last Winter however, the spectacle actually
falls flat because it consists of disappointingly horrible special
effects.
Good thing the spectacle is unnecessary and disregardable, because
otherwise, The Last Winter is an excellent genre film with an honorable
and intelligent global warming message mixed in. At least one critic
has already referred to it as "The Thing meets An Inconvenient
Truth," but that label makes the film seem more lecturing than
it truly is. Instead Fessenden manages to merely touch on the global
warming issue without being heavy-handed or preachy, and he concentrates
primarily on the drama of the characters as they relate to the sparse,
blindingly white landscape.
The station here is in Northern Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge (substituted with Icelandic shooting locations), where an oil
company is looking for places to drill. Like the best of its genre,
The Last Winter features a varied team of experts, each played effectively
by distinguished character actors. There's the headstrong leader,
Ed (Ron Perlman – in the rare normal, human performance), his
more-sensitive yet still conservative second-in-command, Abby (Connie
Britton), the young new recruit, Max (Zach Gilford) and the nutty
mechanic, Motor (Kevin Corrigan). For regional expertise, there are
two Native American teammates, one a quiet, reserved, elder type (Pato
Hoffman) and the other a lovably plump cook/medic (Joanne Shenandoah).
The trouble for the station begins when Max goes missing while out
mapping the territory. When he finally returns, he's not exactly possessed,
but he has an equally mysterious nature about him. At first, he just
seems spooked, while claiming to have seen things out in the snow.
According to him, the land is haunted by the ghosts of the animals
that roamed there eons ago, as in those creatures since turned into
fossil fuels. Then, obsessed with what he supposedly saw, and set
to prove it to the rest of them, he heads out one night with a video
camera and no clothes. The next day he is found frozen to death, with
his eyes pecked out by birds. Slowly other team members start to lose
it, and seemingly non-paranormal yet coincidentally strange accidents
occur. And yes, more people end up dead.
Meanwhile, also staying at the station is a pair of environmental
scientists, James (James LeGross) and his assistant, Elliot (Jamie
Harrold), who cause Ed headaches by pointing out that the weather
is too sporadic and the temperature is rising too exponentially for
the team to ethically continue their work. Despite the duo's clashes
with Ed's ambitions, though, they also are technically working for
the oil company. So, even though James means well and wants to make
an impact, he is replaceable and therefore not too influential. This
somewhat makes Ed and James two sides of the same coin, and neither
of them is really more of a protagonist than the other. What is interesting
about their tension is that Ed is like an aged strong man while James
is like an aged pretty boy, as if they are two passed-over Hollywood
action-hero types who can no longer cut it if faced with a villainous
threat. So, basically they're both screwed as far as whatever supernatural
force might be out there, because it could really care less about
what each man's ideals are.
But let's address the problem of that supernatural force, which eventually
does materialize on screen in the form of some cheap CGI. It is fair
to dismiss the bad-looking apparitions by deciding that they are inconsequential
and maybe even just representative of the bad visions in the minds
of the characters. The great thing about the eerie events in The Last
Winter is that they all could happen under normal circumstances and
with perfectly natural explanations. Like Fessenden's other work,
particularly his almost equally appreciable previous film, Wendigo,
the supernatural is treated as it is typically treated in real life,
as a loose possibility to those who might believe in it, but completely
ignorable to those who can find other, more rational answers.
Fessenden's genius is his ability to balance themes and ideas, like
that of the natural versus supernatural, so that there is tension
and also equilibrium. The Last Winter additionally features this balance
in its dual non-protagonists, as well as in its ability to be both
a sci-fi horror film and a message film. The story compliments and
anchors the intentionally communicated issues (again, Fessenden is
not subtle, but neither is he forceful), and vice versa, with neither
overemphasized.
The Last Winter is very similar to Danny Boyle's Sunshine, another
excellent science fiction film from this year, which was unfortunately
ignored in theaters. It too featured the conventions of the sci-fi
horror genre and it also suffered only from and in its climactic struggle
with a material villain, again unnecessary within the film's context.
But like The Last Winter, Sunshine worked terrifically as a smartly
examined story about the mental capacities of humans put in extreme
environments. The two films are atmospherically so different, but
psychologically so equivalent. I highly recommend them both, maybe
as a double feature. LINK
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PAPER
MAGAZINE by Dennis Dermody
THE LAST WINTER
IS "AN INCONVENIENT SPOOK."
Check out The Last Winter opening this week. I admit to being a fan
of director’s Larry Fessenden’s artful, eerie, terror
tales (Wendigo, Habit), and his new slice of strangeness takes place
at a remote Alaskan outpost where a team is investigating the readiness
for oil drilling while the drastic climate changes and the increasingly
alarming behavior of the crew suggest that there’s “something
off."
Ron Perlman plays the blustery macho boss desperate to get the project
rolling who locks horns with an ecological investigator (the always
terrific James LeGross). But when mysterious deaths begin to occur
it does seem to suggest something supernatural might be rising from
the earth. I suppose this can be called environmental horror, or An
Inconvenient Spook. But Fessenden does wonders with fluid camerawork
and music creating the mood of isolation and shifting moods of the
crew in this this icy wilderness. When the terror kicks it’s
wonderfully disorienting and creepy. A darkly poetic apocalyptic chiller
that proves “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature."
LINK
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LOS
ANGELES TIMES by
Carina
Chocano; September
21, 2007
'The Last Winter' Gothic horror rises in the Arctic
Freud described the uncanny as the horror that stems from something
that feels familiar and unfamiliar at once, caused by the return of
something that was concealed or repressed. It's a feeling that courses
through Larry Fessenden's "The Last Winter," which is set
and partly shot in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (The
rest was shot in Iceland.) It also sums up the plot of the movie,
a contemporary gothic thriller about the perils of messing with nature.
The advance team for an oil company waits for temperatures to drop
so that it can start drilling in the formerly protected wildernesss
preserve, but the weather isn't cooperating and the members are getting
cagey. The permafrost is melting, which is making the ice roads unpassable
and releasing into the air all kinds of formerly frozen organisms,
viruses and -- who knows? -- the ghosts of the fearsome creatures
that roamed the Earth until they died and got mulched into fossil
fuels.
The movie opens with a corporate propaganda video that explains that
a "historic vote in Congress" has allowed North Industries
to send an advance team into the wilderness to study the effect of
drilling, bringing us one step closer to energy independence. The
presentation ends with the Orwellian-sounding motto, "Trust,
risk, results," which turns out to double as a to-do list for
the apocalypse.
North's advance team members doesn't radiate quite the level of slick
and can-do competence of the company's promotional materials, however.
In fact, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the scrappy
space truckers of the Nostromo. (Fessenden was going for "Alien"
and John Carpenter's "The Thing," mood-wise, and mission
accomplished.) The camp mechanic, Motor (the lovably off-putting Kevin
Corrigan), spends his days in a cloud of pot smoke; cook Dawn (Joanne
Shenandoah) serves grotesque slop and devours romance novels; scientist
Elliott (Jamie Harrold) pines for home and spends his day writing
e-mails to his mother; young Maxwell (Zach Gilford), whose father
thought he could put his love of the outdoors to use by drilling for
oil in a pristine setting, seems understandably out of sorts; and
the mysterious native Alaskan Lee (Pato Hoffman) does little, says
less but smiles to himself like someone who knows something.
Parked in the frozen wilderness with nothing to do, the team members
begin to sense that something is wrong. Or maybe it's just their guilt
bubbling to the surface. Either way, Maxwell becomes increasingly
unnerved and James Hoffman (James LeGros), the environmental expert
hired by North mainly for PR purposes, spends hours holed up in his
shack, meticulously transforming his temperature log into a dark record
of his terror and confusion. Their trepidation may be inchoate, but
it makes perfect sense. As Maxwell remarks, what is oil but fossils,
plants and animals from millions of years ago? Millions of years'
worth of buried decay combined with repressed guilt. "Why do
we despise the world?" Hoffman writes. "What if the thing
we are here to pull out rose up?"
When Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), the moody, hard-drinking and arrogant
team leader, arrives in the camp bearing booze and cheap fiction,
he finds that his former lover Abby (Connie Britton) and Hoffman (pun
perhaps not intended?) have fallen into a casual relationship built
on wary attraction. Hoffman recommends they cancel the project, but
Ed charges ahead even after Maxwell, his "charge," wanders
off into the night and returns three hours later, transformed.
It's billed as an environmental horror story, but "The Last Winter"
bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted
science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature. It
bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality,
decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the
face of the sublime power of nature. It also accomplishes with a modest
budget and a talented cast what bigger, slicker, gorier contemporary
horror movies rarely do. It taps into a collective dread compounded
by the guilt of our complicity. The scrappy, familiar banality of
Fessenden's vision -- the base camp is a dump, the crew unglamorous,
their mission compromised -- only amps up the visceral dread. You
know these people wouldn't stand a chance against nature if it decided
to fight back against the parasitic virus that's destroying it, and
you know you wouldn't, either.
Speaking of things potentially viral, the film is available on demand
at the same time it opens in theaters, a strategy that gives a modest
movie like "The Last Winter" a better chance of reaching
more people. Yes, thawing is bad for the environment. But as far as
the film landscape goes, the more stuff bubbles up from the cultural
permafrost, the better. LINK
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LA
WEEKLY BLOG - Scott Foundas
(excerpt)
"VOTE FOR PEDRO AND LARRY"
...For now, though, I will focus on the fifth film I saw on that dies
mirabilis, because it is one likeliest to have missed the radar of
even some of the more discriminating festivalgoers. It’s called
The Last Winter, and it’s the latest slice of existential modern
horror from writer-director (and sometimes actor) Larry Fessenden.
I say latest because, though he is hardly a household name, Fessenden
has spent much of the last 15 years putting his richly idiosyncratic
and highly political spin on a series of timeless horror-fantasy myths.
Indeed, it is often by virtue of what Fessenden does that we come
to understand why those age-old scary stories have lost none of their
creepy resonance over time. In No Telling (1991), Fessenden used the
basic architecture of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a means
of weighing in on the debates over animal testing and the morality
of science. In the Independent Spirit Award-winning Habit (1997),
vampirism stood as a metaphor for dependency — chemical and
emotional — and the alienation of modern life in the big city.
And in Wendigo (2001) — Fessenden’s best-known film to
date — the titular creature may be a werewolf-like Native American
spirit, but the real force wreaking havoc on its characters’
lives is the clash between the ancient and the modern, between “civilized”
man and his primal, animalistic nature.
These are not traditional monster movies by a long shot. Rather, like
George Romero (whose own deconstructionist vampire movie, Martin,
predates Habit by two decades), Fessenden is interested most in the
collision of real and imagined horrors, and in the human impulse to
fashion myths and legends as a way of giving meaning to a fundamentally
shapeless world. The Last Winter is certainly no exception —
much to the dismay, I suspect, of some of the clearly mystified acquisitions
and distributions executives who wandered into the movie’s Toronto
press screening, clearly lured by the promises of “ghost story”
and “supernatural horror” proffered by the description
in the festival catalogue.
Set in remote Alaska, the film concerns an American oil company’s
top-secret drilling project, designed to bring “energy independence”
to the American people while, quite possibly, wreaking havoc on the
delicate environment of the Arctic tundra. Not that such warnings
(most of them issued by a visiting scientist played by James Le Gros)
do much to deter the drilling team’s blustery leader (an excellent
Ron Perlman) from blasting ahead with the project. Until, that is,
some unseen, primordial force seems to bubble up from the ground along
with that black gold, infecting everyone and everything with which
it comes into contact. Could it be the spirit of the Wendigo yet again?
Perhaps. But as usual in a Fessenden film, in The Last Winter mankind
is its own worst enemy.
Filmed in Iceland in breathtaking 35mm widescreen, The Last Winter
is Fessenden’s biggest and most “professional” production
to date, but in making that leap, the filmmaker has in no way compromised
his artistic integrity. True to form, the movie is more about disquieting
mood and serenely creepy atmosphere than about slam-bang action or
shock-horror jolts. When people start to die, the survivors don’t
run around screaming in a hysterical panic, but rather rationally
and intelligently weigh their options. And the final, apocalyptic
moments are presented less as a “twist” than as the inevitable.
The Last Winter won’t create much “buzz” in the
industry press and won’t win many fans among those who place
the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But
this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about
the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet. Oh, and
it’s also scary as fuck. Link
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TV
GUIDE.COM by Maitland McDonagh /4
Larry Fessenden's quietly unnerving horror picture revolves around
an eight-person oil-drilling advance crew stalked by some malevolent,
unseen something that lurks in the unbearable whiteness of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge.
Off limits for development until a recent congressional decision,
the Wildlife Refuge's oil reserves are largely an unknown quantity:
The only effort was ever made to assess the situation was back in
1986, when the Kick Corp sank a test well that was immediately sealed.
Now mega-corporation North Industries has established a team in the
area and charged gruff, macho company man Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman)
with clearing the way to move in heavy drilling equipment. This being
the 21st century, the North Industry crew is accompanied by environmental
expert James Hoffman (James LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor
(James Harrold), who must assess the impact of the company's plans
before construction can proceed. Pollack and Hoffman clash immediately,
and not just over their diametrically opposed points of view about
wilderness development, the energy crisis and global warming: While
Pollack was a away on a five-week trip to corporate headquarters,
Hoffman hooked up with Pollack's girl, Abby (Connie Britton). The
atmosphere is already explosive when junior team member Maxwell (Zack
Gilford) disappears for several hours and returns traumatized by something
he can't or won't describe. Isolated and spooked, the team members
succumb to a sense of creeping anxiety that turns to paranoia and,
inevitably, violence.
Fessenden's claustrophobic thriller, shot in Alaska and Iceland, inevitably
recalls antecedents John Carpenters THE THING (1982) , the first-season
X-Files episode "Ice" and, of course, ALIEN (1979), with
its blue-collar team of working stiffs thrown to the wolves by their
uncaring corporate masters. Neither Pollack nor Hoffman is as straightforward
a character as he first appears, and the film's escalating anxiety
is rooted as much in the characters' subtle, thorny relationships
as fear of monsters and madmen. Fessenden consistently ignores contemporary
trends in fright films; his brand of horror unfolds at the intersection
of myth and modern-day malaise and gets there by way of a slow, excruciating
build up rather than a series of short, sharp shocks. And if the film's
11th-hour CGI effects aren't entirely convincing, the notion that
oil itself is haunted by the restless spirit of every once-living
thing that time reduced and mingled into the earth's black blood throws
off a primordial chill. LINK
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filmfreakcentral.net
- Bill Chambers
9/19/06
Larry Fessenden
has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's
a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its
use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle
it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that
if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about
Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual
in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last Winter
unfurls at an Alaskan outpost, where the blustery Pollack (Ron Perlman,
delivering another perfectly-metered performance) has docked hoping
to kick-start stalled plans to drill for oil. He's pitted against
environmental scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros), with whom his former
girlfriend Abby (the lovely Connie Britton) has fallen into bed, giving
Fessenden ample opportunity to exploit the alpha-male subtext of many
a red state/blue state conflict. In fact, the Bush/Gore allegory is
so compelling in and of itself that, while I wouldn't begrudge the
picture its horror elements (Fessenden is the genre fan's salvation,
after all), with supernatural as opposed to psychological forces taking
out the team, The Last Winter builds to an apocalypse whose nihilism
suggests equivocation. Too, the picture is kind of perched, teeter-totter-like,
on a shocking Blair Witch set-piece, never to reach its lofty heights
again. Still and all, an elegiac piece of filmmaking that transcends
cheap thrills in each of its onscreen casualties; I'd love to see
Fessenden try his hand at a war movie. Link
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REVERSESHOT By Andrew Tracy
Cold Comforts
Horror is the
most overburdened genre in existence, weighed down with so much symbolic,
political, and sociological portent that it’s a marvel when a
film can actually get down to the business of being scary. While unpretentious
and well-crafted efforts like Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn fall by
the wayside, the latest offerings from each newly minted horror “auteur”
come with allegory locked firmly in place for critical exegesis, while
any actual insight into their ostensible “real” topic is
precisely nil. This isn’t to say that horror films are obliged
to stay out of the real world and within their own supposed generic
boundaries—rather that an attempt to address the real world must
be made intrinsic to those boundaries, a part of the film rather than
an imposed reading.
Larry Fessenden is a self-confessed horror filmmaker, and not only perhaps
the greatest one working today—his potential rivals being Kiyoshi
Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho—but also the most pointedly political,
emotionally invested, and unguardedly honest. Unlike his dissembling
contemporaries, his films are defiantly about what they are about. Rather
than the comfortable “archetypes” with which so many horror
faux-teurs skim across any real investment in their material, Fessenden
always has an actual subject, whether it’s the self-destruction
of addiction in Habit or the familial breakdown of Wendigo, and it’s
from these subjects that the atmosphere and fright emanate. Fessenden
is not making art movies (or political tracts) in horror-film clothing,
but employing the genre to break open the dread at the heart of his
subjects, to give their terrifying formlessness a transitory form.
In The Last Winter, his most ambitious and masterful film thus far,
he deliberately pushes the capabilities of cinematic representation
to incarnate that unimaginable fear. The familiar scenario—an
oil-drilling team in Alaska suddenly confronted by strange atmospheric
conditions and various ghostly presences circling their camp—and
familiar character types—he-man foreman (Ron Perlman), sensitive,
bearded scientist (James LeGros), smart and tough woman caught between
them (Connie Britton), the grubby, bearded, talkative mechanic, inevitably
named Motor (Kevin Corrigan)—promises a better-or-worse rerun
of familiar pleasures, with a trendy overlay of environmental doomsaying.
But Fessenden continually undercuts both the expected progression of
shocks—stifling or cutting short the expectedly scary bits and
introducing jagged rhythms and unsettling discrepancies into what should
be the rest periods between scares—and the comfy, audience-flattering
“higher” thematic content. Fessenden is not praising our
sharpness in divining the “real” subject of his film beneath
the generic trappings. He is using those trappings to their fullest
in order to burst through them, penetrating our distanced genre connoisseurship
and striking us at our most naked, vulnerable, fearful point: the very
real possibility of human extinction buried beneath the endless “debate”
over irreversible ecological breakdown.
This must be made clear: The Last Winter is not an allegory of ecological
apocalypse, but an envisioning of it. While its plot outline fits it
snugly into the eco-horror/revenge-of-nature subgenre, it allows the
audience no distancing from its truly terrifying topic. Hopelessness
has been made just another exploitable trope in the horror genre, a
cheap shock for the final reel (see the remade Dawn of the Dead or the
recent, execrable 28 Weeks Later); for Fessenden, it is the shaping
force of his film. Not that he is in any way a nihilist: with his warmly
drawn characters, he’s the most humanistic of horror filmmakers,
if that’s not a contradiction in terms. The unavoidable fates
that befall his characters in The Last Winter are both tragic and deserved.
His people are not merely unlucky representatives of humanity arbitrarily
chosen for nature’s punishment, they are members of humanity whose
own actions and thoughts, however ill- or well-intentioned, have contributed
to the destruction being unleashed from within the much-abused earth.
And the forms that destruction takes are frightening not only because
they are expertly and unnervingly directed by Fessenden, but because
they increasingly become disconnected from any discernible “rules”—working
within the boundaries of genre, they begin to move beyond the safety
afforded the viewer therein. What is inexplicable to the characters
should by all rights be explicable to us, but for one of the few times
in horror cinema, we are presented with a situation where we honestly
don’t know what to expect next. And combined with the gathering
portents of a horrible revelation to come, we are faced with a situation
both fearful and hopeful: the chance that we might see something genuinely
new, a rarity not just for horror cinema but any cinema.
There are thus two levels of suspense created and maintained throughout
The Last Winter. The first is Fessenden’s, in his often brilliant
command of mood, atmosphere, and timing; the second is ours, as we wonder,
hope, that the revelation can possibly equal the masterful build-up
Fessenden has given it. To put it simply, it doesn’t. But the
gonzo insanity of the last ten minutes, so drastically breaking with
the slow, gathering dread that preceded it, almost seems a humble confession
on the director’s part: a confession that nothing he puts on the
screen could possibly be more frightening than the reality he’s
concerned with. The Last Winter ultimately isn’t “satisfying”
because there is no real-world satisfaction for what it speaks of. This
horror cannot be contained in our stories or our images. It has a logic
of its own so alien to ours that even our best attempts to decipher
it must fail, and our knowledge be limited to an awareness of its implacable
approach. Hoots and jeers might accompany the finale of The Last Winter,
but they’re only a coping mechanism for the terrible truth it
uncovers—what it knows about that which is impossible to know.Link
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CINEMASCOPE - By Adam
Nayman
THE
BIG CHILL: Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter
Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) concludes with a scene in which
a small boy faces down a pair of boots left sitting in a hospital
corridor. The boots belonged to his father who has just died on the
operating table, the victim of a senseless tragedy perpetrated by
a stranger; they’ve been absent-mindedly dropped on the ground
by his wife whose grief precludes her from noticing her son languishing
at the other end of the hallway. As Fessenden cuts between the boy,
stock-still and tiny beneath the high ceiling, and the forlorn, abandoned
footwear, a plangent visual metaphor emerges: this small child suddenly
has some very big shoes to fill.
It’s solemn stuff for a movie named for—and featuring
several jarring intrusions by—an ominous bi-pedal Native American
deer-spirit. But Fessenden’s cinema is distinguished by the
various miraculous equilibriums it sustains, precarious but increasingly
sure-footed balancing acts between seemingly exclusive concepts: high-concept
and low-budget, abstraction and immediacy, the shopworn and the visionary.
No Telling (1991) clumsily but ambitiously re-framed the Frankenstein
story through the lens of the animal-rights debate, while Habit (1997)
unravelled the bleak tale of a disheveled teetotaler (played by Fessenden
himself in a twitchy tour-de-force) whose new girlfriend just might
be a vampire. The shoestring tangle of big themes (scientific progress
vs. cruelty in No Telling, the monstrousness of addiction and the
spectre of AIDS in Habit) and earnest B-movie craftsmanship in these
films found refinement in Wendigo, an emotional end-of-childhood narrative
(adapted from a short story by Algernon Blackwood) augmented by fluid
camerawork, neatly integrated low-fi special-effects, and a fascinating
eco-horror subtext—the titular creature as a manifestation of
our fragile ecosystem’s wrath.
The wendigo makes a return appearance of sorts in Fessenden’s
astonishing new film The Last Winter. While it’s not technically
a sequel, there’s little doubt that the malevolent entities
menacing the film’s principals—a corporate-backed deep-drilling
crew trolling for oil beneath the pristine white expanse of Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—share a kinship with said antlered
phantom. In both cases, the creatures target human beings who have
encroached on and despoiled their turf, but where Wendigo’s
monster was ultimately revealed to be a protector of sorts (its lone
victim being a remorseless backwoods hunter with human and animal
deaths on his conscience), the things that show up in the last movement
of The Last Winter boast dauntingly larger—even apocalyptic—appetites.
Like Bong Joon-ho’s marvelous (if more straightforward) The
Host, The Last Winter is an environmental horror movie in which our
excesses come home to roost: Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature
scorned. It begins as a careful inventory of horror-movie clichés
(an isolated, fractious group warding off frostbite, paranoia, and
possible ghosts; shades of John Carpenter’s version of The Thing
[1982] and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining [1980]) and evolves—methodically
and brilliantly—into a dead-serious and deeply distressing End
of Days saga. The pervasive sense of head-hung melancholy suggests
Kurosawa Kiyoshi, except that Fessenden isn’t dealing in technophobic
vagaries. The Last Winter addresses issues of global warming and environmental
ruin without cloaking them in allegory—it’s hard to imagine
a more direct assessment of the horrors that will emerge out of our
failed stewardship of the planet.
The gale-force denouement would be irrelevant, however, were the build-up
not so expertly handled: Fessenden’s technique, prone previously
to fits and starts, has never seemed so assured. As in Wendigo, the
director displays a real mastery for wintry environs: the camera swirls
around the drillers’ lonely outpost on the same weightless trajectory
as the snow itself. Inside, the major personalities are quickly established:
Pollack (Ron Perlman) is the team leader, his alpha-male pissing act
(he punctuates every other sentence with “goddamnit”)
fortified by a bear-like bulk and the lean, hard lines of his face.
Next on the food chain is Abby (Connie Britton), Pollack’s unofficial
right-hand woman and occasional lover. At the low end of the pecking
order—after a few vividly gruff veterans—is Hoffman (James
LeGros) a pasty, weak-chinned eco-watchdog who’s come to Alaska
to conduct an environmental-impact study.
That’s too many syllables for Pollack, whose rugged-individualist
bravado smartly conceals a neutered company man’s lack of imagination.
Pollack doesn’t want to hear about Hoffman’s reservations,
but when things start going weird—and to Fessenden’s credit,
it happens very gradually—there comes a point where he has no
choice but to deviate from his rigorous battle plan. The conflicts
are myriad: there’s the war of attrition between Pollack and
Hoffman; the sexual gamesmanship of Abby (who shacks up with Hoffman
on the sly but remains caught between the two men); the crew’s
difficulties with their unusually harsh environs; and Hoffman’s
frustrating internal conflict. He knows that something is wrong—the
weather is out of whack, and seems to be contributing to the mental
strife (sleeplessness, hallucinations, somnambulism) of his colleagues—but
his inability to articulate this admittedly amorphous threat, or to
really stand up to the domineering Hoffman, renders him impotent,
frantically scrawling out his fears in a notebook as things fall apart.
There is a point at which The Last Winter shifts from a story about
ideological intractability and cold-addled stir-craziness into a genuine
genre piece: suffice it to say that it’s one of the scariest
scenes in recent memory, possibly the best prepared and delivered
shock of Fessenden’s career. And yet the film never loses its
grasp on its characters—the groups’ reactions to the escalating
strangeness are uncommonly intelligent (Pollack is obstinate, but
not stupid, to Perlman’s credit ), and the individuals are differentiated
enough that what happens to them matters to us. There are no easy
victims in Fessenden’s films; each loss is felt, and felt hard.
It is this quality of feeling that distinguishes The Last Winter not
only from the current crop of sado-porn horror films, but from most
eco-scare pictures, as well: the gorgeous abstraction of Jennifer
Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes and the pointed finger-wagging
of An Inconvenient Truth are both valid approaches to an unthinkably
terrifying subject, but neither film really qualifies as an emotional
experience. The Last Winter fairly tingles with empathy—for
its autonomous but doomed characters, for the wounded Earth spirits
that pursue them, and for our battered, scooped-out planet. Wendigo
introduced the idea of a rapacious demon with an insatiable appetite
(“The bigger it gets, the hungrier it gets”), hinting
that the carnivore in question was, in fact us. The Last Winter confirms
this postulation, and without a trace of glib, told-you-so smugness.
“We can’t go home again,” reads one of Hoffman’s
notebook scribbles. It’s a familiar sentiment, but completely
devastating in this particular context: this is a film about the present
devouring the future.
There is also a key shot in The Last Winter involving a pair of boots.
But where Wendigo (explicitly referenced again in a jaw-dropping late
shot of a house far away from the main action) suggested that the
shoes, and the attendant responsibilities attached to them, might
be capably filled by an approaching successor. This time out, the
owner is moving inexorably in the other direction, towards oblivion.
It’s bad enough to admit that we’ve burdened the next
generation with salvaging the mess we’ve made of our only home;
what’s worse—and what The Last Winter, in its towering,
inconsolable sadness, understands —is that they might never
get the chance to pick up the slack. Link
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QUEEN ANNE NEWS, Seattle
Seattle
International Film Festival recommendations: THE LAST WINTER by Kathleen
Murphy
The best horror
movies cut deep into inconvenient truths about our unhappy relations
with each other - and Mother Nature. In Larry Fessenden's cautionary
"The Last Winter," an enclave of entrepreneurs (led by Ron
Perlman) and "green" scientists (James Le Gros, Jamie Harrold)
scout a remote, undeveloped Alaskan oilfield. Think of "The Thing"'s
claustrophobic terror - only here, tension is mined from nature's
guerrilla-style assault on the human virus that's infected her. Lack
of budget curtails spectacular F/X, but that works to "Winter"'s
advantage: Fessenden makes his characters real, poignant, their "haunting"
more metaphysical than conventionally monstrous. In vast, inhuman
landscapes, waves of ghostly caribou sweep over dark, melting fields
of permafrost, eerie harbingers of apocalypse.
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DREADCENTRAL
by
Paul McCannibal
Something strange
is happening in the remote arctic plains of Alaska. It seems global
warming is doing more than simply melting the glaciers and ice caps
– something long frozen into the tundra is being liberated to
mankind’s collective detriment. As such, this is a very timely
horror film with its ominous metaphorical connection to global warming.
The underlying framework harkens back to The Thing, with its motley
crew of oil company workers stationed out in the middle of wintry
nowhere, small airplane access only. Their workstation is your standard
functional ice station setup, a communal mess hall, an airplane and
snowcat hanger and small quarters for the individual men and women
working there. All is hunky dory at first as oil-man-in-charge Ed
Pollack (Pearlman) arrives with fresh stocks of food, booze, and smokes.
But one of his workers, James Hoffman (LeGros) has a hidden agenda
– his environmental concerns have brought him here in the guise
of an oil worker, when in fact he wants anything but further drilling
or development.
Add in the fact that Hoffman’s character is banging Pollack’s
on-site former flame and you have a relationship that isn’t
exactly what you’d call amicable. Thankfully, Fessenden doesn’t
pour on the romance or resort to the clichés of "love
conquers all", this dynamic plays out with subtlety and convincing
interpersonal tension.
The scary stuff in this story really creeps in gradually – those
expecting a sudden horrific alien swarm or terrified flamethrower
battles with a giant hulking insectoid beast will likely be disappointed.
The terror impetus here is more a force than anything else. It does
eventually rear its multiple heads later on in a visually impressive
if not overly heart stopping way. But the real enemy is mankind –
as the greedy push to suck the land dry gathers more steam, the eerie
changes to the collective of psyche of the workers gets more pronounced,
and this doesn’t appear to be a strictly localized phenomenon.
Fessenden does a good job of keeping the menace just out of our reach,
the performances are great and the visual feel makes the very most
out of the minimal aesthetic of the arctic plain. As greater obstacles
face our foes, panic sets in effectively, more like how it would actually
be than outright sudden hysteria. In a critical bad move by Pollack
and Hoffman, they end up stranded miles from the nearest station or
northern community, and as they notice the oil leaking from their
snowmobiles you get a real sense of dread for their circumstances
with only 3 hours of daylight in front them to travel on foot.
But ultimately, even though it’s a well crafted and very well
acted film, the end result left me a little cold. Its ambiguity might
ratchet up the fear centers in some viewer’s minds, but when
it’s this straightforwardly and plausibly presented of a scare
tale I prefer to have things wrapped up in a crystal clear manner.
And there are some absurd plausibility gaps – I don’t
believe, for example, that you can plunge over your head into an arctic
stream and dry yourself and your snowsuit off outside with no shelter
and a small twig fire.
But it’s still a good movie and worth seeing. Having not seen
Wendigo or other films by Larry Fessenden, I’m curious now as
he gets a lot of love in the horror scene. If you can see the film
with Mr. Fessenden hosting it, go for it – he’s an entertaining
fellow with his head screwed on right. I’m giving this 3 daggers
out of 5, which definitely would have been 4 had the plot come to
a more specific conclusion, but that’s a personal preference
more than a slight against the movie. Other people I watched it with
didn’t have this qualm. Keep that in mind and if you’re
Fessenden fan already then definitely check out The Last Winter. Link
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INDIEWIRE
by
Michael Koresky
No one would mistake
Larry Fessenden's independent horror project--encompassing films such
as "Habit," "Wendigo," and now "The Last
Winter"--as anything other than ambitious; yet this auteur certainly
proves divisive among viewers. One needs to slough off expectations
of what a "horror film" is supposed to deliver in order
to get on his wavelength; naturally many will not be willing to do
so, since, like his askew creature-feature "Wendigo," "The
Last Winter" moves back and forth between subtle atmospherics
and thudding exposition, and teases its audience with scares that
often never come. It would be overstating things a bit to say that
Fessenden is seriously challenging the rules of horror (there's nothing
particularly radical in his narratives), but he does ask his audience
to focus on character, environment, and allegory, which make his films
somewhat anomalous.
"The Last
Winter" uses similar strategies and effects as "Wendigo,"
but to far more satisfying ends. An eco-horror tale that isn't afraid
to promise utter bleakness, Fessenden uses the wintry "Who Goes
There?" set-up of John Carpenter's "The Thing" and
then supplants its central conceit (outer-space aliens entering the
human blood stream) with something far more alienating for being all
too close: nature itself enacting blood-thirsty vengeance--more terrifying
because it is of this world. "The Last Winter" is more mournful
than alarmist in its environmental distress, and ultimately provides
a fatalistic contrast to the pervasive "what you can do to help"
global warming documentaries: In "The Last Winter," sadly,
Fessenden acknowledges not only futility but also awe in the face
of imminent catastrophe.
In the pristine
blankness of the Northern Alaskan tundra, snow-white yet rapidly melting,
a crew is sent to scout for oil resources, led by the blustery Ed
Pollack (Ron Perlman), an iron-jawed conservative looking out for
corporate interests who's none too pleased by the omnipresence of
tagalong environmentalist Hoffman (James LeGros). Fessenden takes
way too much time sketching the political and personal differences
between Perlman's granite reserve and LeGros's befuddled do-goodism,
and at times, the film threatens to crumble under an endless litany
of musty macho tete-a-tetes. The film is entirely too masculine, in
fact, and the only strong female crew member, Connie Britton's Abby,
has slept with both Pollack and Hoffman, which establishes her as
little more than a stock device and another reason for the men's bitter
disputes.
Yet as often as
the film trades in character types, it also neutralizes them by situating
them within ambiguous, ruminative spaces. The crew encounters a strong
life force (wonderfully captured in camerawork that sails on gusts
of wind) that seemingly turns them against themselves and each other,
though in always disquietingly melancholy rather than startling ways.
So strong is the sense of civil decline within this microcosm that
it comes as quite a disappointment when, at his climax, Fessenden
resorts to some frightfully unscary "Wendigo"-cribbed tricks.
Although it's somewhat unfair to call the director out for simply
seeing his vision through to a concrete ending, one |
BEST OF 2007