Movie Review: What the Hell Is Going On in "The Snowman"?

Unintentionally funny and consistently baffling, The Snowman should have been iced.

The Snowman starts bad, gets worse, and finishes somewhere suboceanic. It may take decades for researchers to plumb its badness; perhaps only with technology yet to be invented.

When I talk about it that way, it almost sounds exciting.

It isn’t.

Director Tomas Alfredson—spoiling a streak that began with Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—has delivered the most inexplicable picture of 2017 with his adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s 2007 novel of the same name. Scenes don’t follow any rational order; motivations turn on a dime; seemingly half of the dialogue is either dubbed or delivered off-screen. In fact, there is so much ADR here, Alfredson’s The Snowman might technically be classified as an audiobook.

I’m not simply saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s not fit for release. Alfredson recently revealed 10 to 15 per cent of the script wasn’t even shot, though any viewer could spot the massive lapses of logic without needing his warning. What’s truly shocking about Alfredson’s defence is that they still filmed 85 to 90 per cent of a screenplay. I would have put the number closer to 40.

The Snowman stars Michael Fassbender as Nesbø’s go-to loose-cannon detective, Harry Hole, which is pronounced exactly as it reads, and never stops sounding hilarious. It's set in Oslo, where women are reported missing, with their heads eventually located independently from their corpses. Hole and his young partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) suspect this may be a serial killer re-emerging after ten years of lying dormant, noting the similarities in the MO: hand-scribbled notes tormenting the investigators, and crude snowmen left in his victims’ yards.

The patchwork of scenes that have been cobbled together might have made better narrative sense if Alfredson’s editor had just hit the randomiser. You only need to look at the trailer (scroll to the bottom) and compare it against the movie to reinforce which sequences were excised, reshot or reordered.

The only thing more bewildering than the relationship between shots is the relationships between characters. From one moment to another, it’s not clear whether Harry and Katrine are romantically involved or sworn nemeses. Considering how badly the filmmakers bungled the grizzled mentor/protégé relationship—the most basic trope in procedural drama—it’s astounding to me they felt confident enough to have Chloë Sevigny play twin sisters, or involve Harry in a four-way paternal struggle over a step-son of sorts. Gang, you’ve gotta crawl before you can sprint.

Who’s to blame? Alfredson certainly needs to wear much of it. Same goes for the three individual screenwriters—Hossein Amini, Peter Straughan, Søren Sveistrup—who, I guess, are each responsible for roughly 28 per cent of the script that actually made it to the screen. The cast, facing insurmountable odds, don’t exactly salvage much of The Snowman either. Fassbender’s Harry Hole is uncharismatic and sleepy; Ferguson, wrestling some loopy character motives, never had a chance. J.K. Simmons, as a wealthy suspect, at least puts on a Norwegian accent. Everyone else is speaking the king's.

It's harder to tell what Val Kilmer's speaking. He plays Gert Rafto, the detective who first began hunting the titular serial killer and to whom we flash back to over the feature, and his dialogue appears to have been redubbed, or deleted entirely. The Snowman reaches the zenith of embarrassment during one encounter between Kilmer and Toby Jones (as a fellow detective), where they stare at each other for what seems like an eternity without uttering a word; meanwhile, some unseen cops explain their relationship via walkie-talkie. What. Is. Happening?

And then there's how The Snowman literally fridges its female characters, feeling more like an act of misogyny rather than a comment on violence against women; and how it hobbles itself by eradicating its only sympathetic character, when no such thing happens in the book; and how it fatally self-owns with its final face-off, which is so reluctant and dismissive you wonder why the hell we were even invited along for the ride.

I'll concede, there are images from cinematographer Dion Beebe that appear to have come from a proper flick; the best of them being a snaking leviathan of cold air over a frozen river in that final, anticlimactic showdown. And that’s as generous as I can be.

The Snowman is proof that not everything can be fixed in post, unless we’re talking about hitting ‘delete all’.

1.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for strong themes and violence.

Photo: Universal Pictures