This little film set in Minnesota during the coldest months of the year stars Emma Thompson and Judy Greer. Any one of those things would have lured me into seeing this, so having all of those things together sounded like a good movie.
Thompson plays Barb, a widow who goes ice fishing at a remote northern Minnesota lake to say goodbye to her deceased husband. She has flashbacks to their early life together, like their first date and how he proposed and when they lost their baby. These memories are both happy and profoundly sad. She witnesses what she believes is a kidnapping, a man forcing a young woman into the woods, and follows.
What she finds is a woman in a purple snowsuit (Greer) and her husband keeping the young woman in the cellar of an old cabin. Barb tries again and again to free the girl, but the woman in the purple suit proves a formidable foe even as it becomes obvious that she is very ill.
While I would have loved for the winter aspect of this film to be a little more formidable, I still found this to be a decent watch. The story and plotting manage to make each character worth a little empathy. Even Greer’s character who so selfishly wants to take the young woman’s liver that she does not care who dies in the process. I still felt for her since her motivations were that she did not want to die herself.
Thompson and Greer put in superb performances. Thompson is every bit the grieving widow who finds the strength to help someone she doesn’t even know and gives the woman the love she had for the child she lost. Greer is unrelenting in her mission. Even when her husband is struggling with hypothermia, her sole purpose is to harvest that woman’s liver if she wants to survive whatever illness she is suffering from.
As I said, I wish the setting had a little more to offer here. When Thompson is driving to the lake, the radio speaks of a large snowstorm but it never really materializes. While the husband gets hypothermia, he seems to be the only one suffering from the effects of long exposure to cold temperatures. Not a single one of these characters ends up with frostbite or windburn. I’ve lived in Minnesota since 1998, and my fingers and toes feel numb in less than an hour in cold temperatures. None of that seemed to happen in this movie.
4 out of 5 stars, mostly for the cast being great in it.
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Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
This little film set in Minnesota during the coldest months of the year stars Emma Thompson and Judy Greer. Any one of those things would have lured me into seeing this, so having all of those things together sounded like a good movie.
Thompson plays Barb, a widow who goes ice fishing at a remote northern Minnesota lake to say goodbye to her deceased husband. She has flashbacks to their early life together, like their first date and how he proposed and when they lost their baby. These memories are both happy and profoundly sad. She witnesses what she believes is a kidnapping, a man forcing a young woman into the woods, and follows.
What she finds is a woman in a purple snowsuit (Greer) and her husband keeping the young woman in the cellar of an old cabin. Barb tries again and again to free the girl, but the woman in the purple suit proves a formidable foe even as it becomes obvious that she is very ill.
While I would have loved for the winter aspect of this film to be a little more formidable, I still found this to be a decent watch. The story and plotting manage to make each character worth a little empathy. Even Greer’s character who so selfishly wants to take the young woman’s liver that she does not care who dies in the process. I still felt for her since her motivations were that she did not want to die herself.
Thompson and Greer put in superb performances. Thompson is every bit the grieving widow who finds the strength to help someone she doesn’t even know and gives the woman the love she had for the child she lost. Greer is unrelenting in her mission. Even when her husband is struggling with hypothermia, her sole purpose is to harvest that woman’s liver if she wants to survive whatever illness she is suffering from.
As I said, I wish the setting had a little more to offer here. When Thompson is driving to the lake, the radio speaks of a large snowstorm but it never really materializes. While the husband gets hypothermia, he seems to be the only one suffering from the effects of long exposure to cold temperatures. Not a single one of these characters ends up with frostbite or windburn. I’ve lived in Minnesota since 1998, and my fingers and toes feel numb in less than an hour in cold temperatures. None of that seemed to happen in this movie.
4 out of 5 stars, mostly for the cast being great in it.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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