It is too bad that the people who make trailers do not make the movie because they have a real sense of what works in this story. Barb (Emma Thompson) decides to go to Lake Hilda on a snowy day to fulfill a loved one’s dying wish, but stumbles upon a cabin with a suspicious man (Marc Menchaca) and a patch of blood on the snow. Barb soon discovers that he and his wife (Judy Greer) have kidnapped Leah (Laurel Marsden). Barb promises to not leave Leah until she has saved her. If you love Thompson and Greer, the lemon may be worth the squeeze. Director Brian Kirk captures the stunning beauty of Finland, which plays Minnesota. Movie composer Nicholas Jacobsen-Larson and actor Dalton Leeb fancy themselves to be the next Coen Brothers and decide to pen “Dead of Winter” (2025), but wind up coming in second place to “Trust” (2025) vying for the title, but coming in second for the dumbest movie of 2025.
The real story of “Dead of Winter” is the battle of the wives. Barb is the good wife. The story is structured to intercut to flashbacks starting at 1982 then moving forward at various intervals from the first time that she came to the lake to how she wound up there in the present day. The flashbacks are supposed to be heartwarming and sun dappled memories of happier days filled with love and happiness. It is utterly predictable, and only seem to exist so Gaia Wise, Thompson’s daughter, can play younger Barb, which I did not know while watching it, but makes more sense in retrospect. These flashbacks are meant to convey that Barb’s best days are behind her, and she is in the winter of her life with nothing to lose. Women of all ages have been saving each other since the dawn of humanity while still exercising some element of self-preservation. Those pesky “Midsommar” (2019) values creep up when you least expect it. The movie feels like propaganda that women must only live for others, and once Barb’s caretaking days are over, she must continue to prove her goodness through extreme self-sacrifice. Boo boo, tomato tomato.
Cue the harridan, the shrew, the bad wife, who is only credited as Purple Lady, which is dumb. Let’s stick to the Bad Wife. Equally culpable heterosexual couples have existed since the dawn of man: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, Phillip Craig and Nancy Garrido, Fred and Rosemary West, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, etc. While movies do need to remind the public that women are human; thus, can be dangerous too, “Dead of Winter” bends over backwards to make the husband, who is billed as Camo Jacket and maybe named Vinnie, but let’s just call him the Husband, into a complete sad sack who also provides comedic relief at his ineptitude. Even Barb eventually validates his self-proclaimed goodness when he returns her wedding ring which got lost in their many Kevin McAllister moments, but of course, only after she wounds his foot. The Bad Wife is the worst because she cares less about her husband than Barb and is willing to do anything to get what she wants, which feels cockamamie in the worst way possible.
“Dead of Winter” runs out of runway fairly early. The writers forgot to make Leah a person so the audience can get invested in her plight. While all the characters are thin, barely two-dimensional sketches of people, poor Leah barely gets any lines and seems about as sentient as a slab of concrete. Fortunately for movie goers, Thompson and Greer have been in the biz for a long time and know how to fill in the blanks. While Thompson’s accent seems bafflingly more Brooklyn than Minnesota, she still imbues her trite lines with more gravitas than they deserve, complete with a speech about the Great Blizzard of 1888, which I actually rewound to listen to because I was just waiting for the run time’s end and to completely vacate the premises so I could follow it out. It is fun to see Thompson become an action actor at the eleventh hour, but the best scenes are shown in the trailer.
Greer deserved a break from playing mournful moms in the excellent “Eric LaRue” (2023) and “The Long Walk” (2025) or inspirational ones in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” (2024). Greer chews the scenery in “Dead of Winter” and could give the Terminator a run for his money. Despite being pale and wan, she is a one-woman army willing to take on anyone who crosses her, but sadly Kirk does not take his time with these scenes and treats the violence in a perfunctory way. Filmmakers can disapprove of a character and still relish a badass villain. She is framed more as a party pooper who keeps spoiling any attempts at rescue to a laughable degree.
Is “Dead of Winter” a period movie? It feels like it, but the era is unclear. Barb does not have GPS, and no one has cell phones to call for help assuming that they are not stupid, which is unclear. Near the end of the second act, more characters are introduced to ratchet up the tension for poor Barb, but feel like a waste of time, which is the real crime since Brian F. O’Byrne plays one of the two new characters, and he gets nothing to do. Honestly Barb was doing better without anyone’s help.
While the script failed to keep it simple and tied itself in knots to tell a heavy-handed, uneven moral story to a ridiculous degree, Kirk understood the assignment and only screws up one scene where golden light is filtering through the water, but on the surface, the lighting is still cold, white and grey. It is a minor, romantic, forgivable error. It is a pretty movie that almost makes ice fishing in the middle of a snowstorm seem appealing. Barb lives in a trailer, and Kirk and his cinematographer Christopher Ross manage to make it feel warm and heartwarming, the last place of peace other than the past. In contrast, the cabin seems straight out of a horror movie though with more pulled punches.
While it is wonderful to see excellent actors like Thompson and Greer play roles unlike anything that they have ever done before, they deserve better than “Dead of Winter.” Kirk is a seasoned television director who has only made a handful of films and did not drop the ball his fourth time in the chair. Jacobson-Larson and Leeb should keep their day jobs or start smaller and work on shorts before trying another feature. Walk before you can run.
