Snow Falls - Movie Review

 

Snow Falls

Movie Review

 

Snow Falls is directed by Colton Tran and written by Luke Genton and Laura M. Young, along with Colton himself, and starring Anna Grace Barlow, Jonathan Bennett, Johnny Berchtold, and Patrick Fabian. Music scored by Johnny X Martinez, cinematography by Michael Dean Greenwood, and editing by Colton Tran.

After a winter storm traps the five friends in a remote cabin without power or food, a disorientation slowly claims their sanity as each succumbs to the fear that the snow itself may be contaminated or some form of evil.

Snow Falls opens with a warning sign, a pair of ravens perched on a sign welcoming the characters to the town of Snow Falls. A big warning sign for onlookers should be an argument going on inside their vehicle. Someone studies sitting on someone's leg or complains about someone not wearing a seat belt. The kind of meaningless chatter that makes you wonder why these people get together.

But five of them, Kit played by Colton Tran, M played by Victoria Morales, Eden played by Anna Grace Barlow, Andy played by James Gosford, and River played by Johnny Berchtold are on a trip to spend New Year's Eve in a “Cabin” is owned by River's family. "Is this your second home?" "Third, if you count what we build on Martha's Vineyard".

Director Colton Tran and screenwriter Luke Genton waste no time in stripping away all the usual clichés. Eden is reeling from her mother's death and being abandoned by her boyfriend, and River is interested in her, but can't muster up the courage to make a move, or is too busy indulging in conspiracy theories. Andy says his Instagram followers, "only bought half of them," and his girlfriend, M, is a hypochondriac. Kit is kind of there, sometimes telling lame jokes. These are the usual superficial details that pass for character development in movies like this.

A minor difference here is that phone reception is "spotty" rather than non-existent, so the group can take calls when the plot requires it. One is from River's father played by Patrick Fabian and they hear from their friend Jace played by Jonathan Bennett, warning of a snowstorm.

That storm, a bomb tornado with blizzard status, hit shortly after midnight, quickly knocking out power and making roads impassable. They were trapped in the cabin with limited firewood and no more alcohol than food. Now if I had written Snow Falls it would have been part of a hungry sasquatch coming out of the woods. But I didn't write it that way, instead, it turns out to be a weak survival movie at first, and then Rivers theorizes that they're behaving strangely, seeing things, seeing cold, food, and sleeplessness. Not because Snow is infected with some kind of virus.

Now if there was a virus, cabin fever would have gone away by the time the snow fell and maybe the movie would have been saved. Instead, we get some hallucinations, people doing stupid things like freezing themselves in skimpy clothes. The infamous Russian sleep experiment is mentioned, everyone winds themselves up a little too much, and a lot of silliness ensues as they start to turn on each other.

There are some funny scenes in Snow Falls, where the snowman was kind of creepy trying to break a glass door with his carrot nose. The idea of a toxic blizzard would make for an entertaining movie. But Tran and Benton take it too seriously and fail to deliver any real fear or tension. They need to decide if they're making a psychological thriller or a horror film and just go with it without achieving anything.

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