‘Dead of Winter’ Review: Emma Thompson Trapped in a Snowbound Minnesota Nightmare

Even though it was shot in Finland, Dead of Winter feels like one of those ice-cold thrillers straight out of the northern United States —Minnesota, more specifically. A clear heir to films like Fargo and A Simple Plan, Brian Kirk’s movie —a director with deep TV credentials ranging from Game of Thrones to The Day of the Jackal— plays like a blend of grim crime procedural and human drama, with a streak of dark humor that feels true to both the style and the region’s particular kind of locals. It’s intense, unexpectedly violent, and surprisingly emotional. The film tries to juggle a lot of different tones at once and, despite a few slips, mostly pulls it off. It’s a small but punchy thriller that lands when you least expect it to.

Emma Thompson’s role echoes the one Frances McDormand played in the Coens’ classic. She’s not a cop here, but she is a plainspoken, seemingly honest woman who finds herself caught up in a bizarre criminal situation in the middle of a frozen nowhere. Barb Sorenson is an ice fisher trying to locate a lake in the brutal depths of a Minnesota winter. Disoriented, she stumbles upon a cabin where she encounters a man (Marc Menchaca) who’s clearly startled by her presence. She asks him for directions, he gives them — but Barb notices bloodstains in the snow and, unwisely, decides to ask about that too. At that point, it’s safe to say Barb is in way over her head.

She tries to leave, but her car gets stuck in the snow and her phone has no signal. From a distance she hears the screams of a woman (Laurel Marsden), visibly distressed and apparently being held captive by the man inside the cabin. Moving cautiously, Barb approaches, discovers the young woman locked in the basement, and sets out to figure out how to rescue her. That’s when another woman (Judy Greer) shows up — someone who seems to be calling the shots and running whatever plan is unfolding. From there on, the film turns into a tense cat-and-mouse game, with Barb trying to save the girl while the kidnappers’ shaky scheme gradually comes into focus.

While the premise starts out grim and violent — Kirk’s use of sound is especially punishing — Dead of Winter folds in two very different elements. Through flashbacks, we learn more about Barb’s past (with Gaia Wise, Thompson’s own daughter, playing her younger self), particularly her relationship with her husband Karl (Cúán Hosty-Blaney). The way these memories weigh on her makes it clear she’s been widowed, and that this place carries emotional baggage tied to that loss. At the same time, the film leans into moments of dark comedy, whether in Barb’s awkward small-town interactions or in the kidnappers’ clumsiness and inexperience — their violence often feels wildly disproportionate, especially in her case.

Eventually, the somewhat forced motivations connecting everything begin to emerge. Narrative contrivances aside —the script is packed with familiar genre mechanics, though most of them do the job—, Kirk’s film works as a desperate, nerve-wracking survival thriller set in a frozen wasteland, ultimately pitting two women against each other who may not be professionals when it comes to navigating criminal situations but are more than capable of dragging each other into increasingly dangerous territory. The men, in fact, end up playing marginal —almost negligible— roles in the story, and whenever they do step in, things tend to go very badly… for them.

Yes, the humor occasionally feels unnecessary, and at times the film pushes too hard on the emotional beats beneath the thriller framework. But even so, Dead of Winter grips thanks to its overwhelming setting, the weight and credibility that Thompson and Greer bring to their characters — especially their shared sense of desperation — and its sharp deployment of the classical elements that Samuel Fuller once described when he called cinema a battlefield: “Love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotion.”