Picture this: The Earth is melting. The alarm bells have been sounded for ages, and nobody is doing anything. The general public wavers between shock and apathy, ultimately settling on profit motives and unending capital growth. Things are getting more and more atomized. You feel called to action, and yet you know you can only watch as shit hits the fan at increasingly high speeds. At a certain point, everything seems to be getting so depressing and solipsistic that you yearn for a real doomsday – a real last winter, if you will. This was Larry Fessenden’s vision in 2006, when he released his potential magnum opus in The Last Winter. How are things today?
Perhaps it’s better to begin discussions of The Last Winter with a brief mention about Wendigo, Fessenden’s earlier, more intimate creature-based horror. That film is closer to a chamber horror, with a minimal cast and fairly sparse narrative developments (the violence is scant and devastating), but it features a similar wintery setting and a nature-as-redemption plot device. The coded politics in that film are present, but are just that: present. In The Last Winter, they are bursting at the seams; it’s an embittered, desperate cry against the world for ravaging itself to dust. There is also, of course, a wendigo spirit, one which seems capable of great destruction but also great beauty. One wonders if, by the end of it, this is even consequential to humanity’s likely doom, or if we’re already getting ourselves there just fine on our own.
Neither the setup nor the political themes are especially radical, yet everything flows together so well that the closest cinematic relative of The Last Winter might be Carpenter’s The Thing, a similarly icy, totally brilliant movie that mines horror from the atomization of man. The Last Winter, like Carpenter’s film, is about a crew in the frozen tundra, this time in Alaska. Both films are microcosmic horrors of sorts — works about how things are obviously dire for their isolated protagonists and how much worse it will get if the outbreak extends beyond their small, deteriorating world.
James Hoffman (James Le Gros, who does phenomenal work) is an environmental consultant who hates his job: working as the patsy for an oil company. Hoffman is a world-weary scientist, someone who, even in his young age, has seen so much of nature obliterated that he feels torn between passionate defiance and quiet obedience. His angel on his shoulder is fellow scientist Elliot Jenkins (Jamie Herrold), who tries to invigorate him into defying oil company North, their employer. His devil is Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman, never better), the head of the local drilling operation, who needs Hoffman’s approval to allow North to commence drilling operations. Pollack’s rhetoric is convincing; he spits out words like “energy independence” as if they have any tangible meaning, and he is clearly peeved about the presence of any environmental loonies in his rugged operation. Things quickly go south when one of Pollack’s family friends, Maxwell (Zach Gilford), goes off the deep end before getting spirited away by some sort of tundra ghost.
The calamities begin to pile up, rescue and help seem a million miles away and there’s little the isolated base can do to save themselves. Fessenden intelligently never really frames his kills in this sequence as being entirely the result of his beloved wendigos; instead, there’s an element of plausible deniability when a character dies from seemingly natural causes or another is killed by a worker who has clearly lost her mind. It’s not until the final segment, where Hoffman and Pollack are at the end of their rope just outside an Inuit village, that Fessenden gives in and shows off his surprisingly well-CGI’d wendigo finale. Pollack’s demise is to be expected from a revenge-minded horror film, but Hoffman’s is some of the most tender in all of cinema; it feels closer to Mekas than anything resembling Carpenter.
The Last Winter is hardly the first horror film to structure its kills around justifiable revenge, but Fessenden treads a dangerous line in his application of that trope. Do the North employees (along with the environmental scientists) deserve death for their stochastic violence against nature? What about their violence against humans – the communities near the base, whose lives are being slowly uprooted due to climate change? The irony of the two (white) disheveled leads groveling before the nearest Native residents after all hell has broken loose will not be lost on astute viewers. Hoffman’s internal voiceovers do a great job at communicating directly what is already implied from the visual language: nature is fighting back against a dangerous parasite — us.
Like all Fessenden’s best films, there’s a sort of unspoken mourning here — mot necessarily for the deaths of the characters, many of which seem apathetic or even excited about the destruction of the world, but because the events don’t seem to change anything. This existentialism is fairly basic; the fact that it somehow works along with everything else the film is doing is a minor miracle. It’s such an overwhelmingly bleak (yet realistic) look at how things are, which can make it a tough sit. The question eventually becomes whether the audience is supposed to identify with the wendigo or with Hoffman. The answer, perhaps, is that it’s easier to identify with one of the workers who met their cruel fate before they realized just how bad things really are.
Fessenden stocks have not been exceptionally high at any point in film history, though they were likely never lower after The Last Winter, which was a colossal flop upon release. It’s not hard to see why: not since Mamet’s Spartan has a Hollywood release been so brutally black-pilled. What pleasures it offers do not depart much from Fessenden’s other, subtler material, and those works, despite their occasional brilliance, never caught on to the degree that they probably should have. This is normally the part where one mourns for the lost reception of the film in question and pleads for any potential readers to give it the old college try. In the case of The Last Winter, it may be more fitting to plead for environmental consciousness and activism instead, no matter how hopeless the prospects seem. If you do need a film to at least jump-start you into that headspace, it’s difficult to think of a more fitting one than this.
