Neil Gray
Going into Frost, I wasn’t as blindingly oblivious as I usually am about the subject matter. The description of Frost reads,
The story of a young woman and her father who have to fight for survival after being stranded on a remote mountainside during a storm.
Which seems pretty self-explanatory. Our two main characters find themselves in a pickle of a situation. The big bad is the incoming storm. An epic fight for survival ensues. When I saw the words “inspired by True Events” at the beginning of Frost, it set off an echo in my head of a news story I read a few years ago about a man who had been in the exact same predicament as Devanny Pinn and Vernon Wells were about to experience for the next hour and twenty minutes, so I was fairly confident that I knew what I was getting into. And to a degree, I was right.
Frost is indeed a story of man and woman against the elements and is a very good psychological thriller/survival horror movie. Right up until the ending. And then, well, we’ll get to that a little down the snow-covered road.
Frost begins with Abby (Devanny Pinn) on the way to see her estranged father Grant (Vernon Wells), who she hasn’t spoken to for five years. We find all this information out because Abby is on the phone with her friend Sasha (Venus DeMilo Thomas) and they’re discussing whether or not Abby is ready for the family reunion. This is a clever little plot device that makes me wonder how writers managed to get by before the invention of mobile phones for them to use to lay out their stories. I’m sorry, that sounds like a dig. It’s not really. I just hate mobile phones, to the point I refuse to have one.
With the call over Abby and Grant are finally reunited. They’re initially happy to see each other, then they fight, then they make up, and the next morning they decide to take a fishing trip together for some quality daddy-and-daughter bonding time. It’s while on the way to the ol’ fishing hole that the car swerves off the road, plummets off an embankment, and puts them in the fight of their lives.
Now, before we go any further, I want you to know that I have left out a very big part of Frost here. Something that is so important to what unfolds that you may be asking yourself why? Quite simply, if I’d included it, it would ruin the film for you. That and I don’t want anyone going into Frost knowing anything more than there is a shock in store that you may or may not be able to get your head around.
The main bulk of Frost is a really well-written and well-acted movie. James Cullen Bressack’s original story is well handled by scriptwriter Robert Thompson. It has the perfect amount of heightened tension throughout, especially in the way it makes you start questioning what’s going to happen when the surprise is revealed early doors. In fact, I spent the vast majority of Frost trying to figure out the ending and why certain shots of Abby looked the way they did, mainly because my brain didn’t want to admit that it knew what was coming.
It helps Frost that director Brandon Slagle knows his way around a camera. He has the uncanny ability to make the scenes within the car seem over-powering and claustrophobic as hell, while somehow managing to pull the same trick off when the movie moves to the great outdoors. That is no small feat as when Frost does delve beyond the confines of the metallic coffin Abby finds herself in, it would’ve been easy to lose that sense of being trapped with seemingly no hope of escape, yet Slagle makes the mountainside feel just as suffocating and oppressive as anything happening back inside the car.
Our two leads are perfectly cast as well. Devanny Pinn is fantastic as Abby. Her portrayal is of someone who first has to face her imaginary fears of meeting her father all over again and then has to face the real-life fears of the horror unfolding around her. She is the driving force behind Frost and she takes that responsibility on her shoulders and carries it well. You feel everything she’s going through. her physical pain and her mental anguish as the situation becomes more and more desperate really are tangible and in the hands of another actor could’ve just become a caricature of itself. There is no ham here at all, just the belief that you are watching a person who reaches the point of breaking and steps over the end.
As for Vernon Wells, well, the guy is a legend. He’s someone who I spent my teenage years watching over and over in Commando and Mad Max 2 and an actor whose career I’ve kept a close eye on through the years, and yes even the Power Rangers stuff he did. So he could’ve come out, read a shopping list, and I would’ve given him a standing bloody ovation. Luckily for me, he went further than that and his Grant is a man haunted by the loss of the love of his life and the fall out from it. A hunter by trade he’s also their best chance of escaping with their lives, and he will do whatever it takes to make sure his daughter survives this ordeal.
With all these components working in unison, Frost really is an edge-of-your-seat, will-they-won’t-they survival horror, and then the ending shows up and throws a spanner in the works.
The problem I had and have with the ending to Frost isn’t that it’s a hard watch—which it was—but that I don’t think it was necessary. Up until that point, Frost had me hooked. I cared about Abby and Grant, I wanted them to make it out the other side, what I didn’t want was what followed. I’m a big fan of The Haunting, and the reason behind that is that you don’t see anything. It’s all in your mind, and Frost had managed to lock me inside my own head—with the occasional bits of gore on screen—tightly enough that the fear was coming from within me. Meaning that when what happens happened, I was pulled out of the moment. If it had been in a comedy horror I’d have laughed at the ludicrousness of it, but because it was in a tense survival horror it left me cold.
But that’s the beauty of reviews. It’s all subjective. What I think is going to be different from what the next person thinks, and even though I’m grateful for everyone who reads my thoughts on movies new and old, you’re all grown-ass adults and you can form your own opinions without me having to hold you by the hand.
I will say this, however. Some of you are going to love the way Frost runs out and others are going to be super offended by it. If you’re in the former camp then there’s something wrong with you, and I suggest you get yourself fitted for a white coat as soon as possible, and if you’re in the latter camp then I hope you can appreciate the film for what it is until those moments. Until the ending happens, Frost is an incredibly nerve-racking survival horror the takes up residence in your brain, rent-free.
I hate formulaic movies that play it safe to keep audiences (and reviewers) happy. After you’ve seen enough of them, they’re mind-numbingly boring. I like it when movies don’t follow the “formula” (in this case, some kind of happy ending). For me, the “shock” scene was entirely plausible, given the circumstances. History is replete with people–particularly semi-conscious, delirious people–doing desperate, unthinkable things in desperate, unthinkable circumstances.
Then there’s the very last scene, though certainly plausible, not the most probable. Seemed to be put there for typical, weak formulaic shock (e.g., “Final Destination” movies). I would have preferred that very last scene to be something I was sort of expecting to happen at some point throughout the film: when something is dangling on the edge of a very steep cliff in a heavy snowstorm for a very long time, what’s the obvious thing that might happen? Now that, to me anyway, would have been a bang up ending serving to augment the prior “shock” scenes (safe loving, wimpy viewers be damned ;).