The Horrible Horror Vault: The one with Emily Blunt

 

 

Title: Wind Chill

What Year?: 2007

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, I’ve been going back through some movies I previously put in the vast “maybe” pile, particularly ones I watched through the Jurassic rent-by-mail service that is publicly shutting down shortly. That gave me an epiphany just how many films there are that I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of watching if my choices had been to stream or buy them outright. This, in turn, brought me back to what just might be a definitive example. It’s an odd film that came on my radar because of the participation of someone whose profile has risen since, which I have still never seen spontaneously mentioned by anyone else, and it happens to fall right in the post-2000 horror category I have been covering since I revived this feature. I present Wind Chill, and even by my standards, it is odd.

Our story begins with a guy and a girl (with no other names) who have just gotten out of college for Christmas. They apparently know each other just well enough for the girl to accept a ride from the guy, which isn’t actually going to lead to that kind of horror film. Things do start to go wrong when the guy tries to take a scenic shortcut, only to be run off the road by a mysterious car that doesn’t seem to leave any tracks on the snow-covered road. The pair face a night of isolation in the wilderness as temperatures drop, and the girl soon discovers the guy hasn’t told her his full story. But any creepiness on the guy’s part takes a back seat as mysterious figures and strange visions begin to appear. The girl soon realizes that they are only the latest of many to be trapped on this road, and the passers-by are the victims of a nasty ghost who started it all. Can they fight back against the undead? Or is it all in their heads? Either way, it’s cold outside, and this is definitely the kind of horror film where nobody is sure to come out alive!

Wind Chill is a 2007 British/ American supernatural/ psychological horror film directed by Gregory Jacobs, known as a veteran assistant director on films including Nightmare On Elm Street 6. The film was a coproduction of Tristar, the British company Blueprint Pictures and Section Eight Productions, the last associated with George Clooney. Filming took place in Vancouver and other locations in western Canada (which is “America”…) in 2006.  The film starred the British actress Emily Blunt (see A Quiet Place) and American Ashton Homes as the unnamed girl and guy, with veteran character Ned Bellamy (Mystery Men) as a would-be rescuer. The film received a limited US theatrical release and subsequent DVD releases in 2007, coinciding with appearances by Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada and Sunshine Cleaning. The film received mixed reviews. It is currently available for digital purchase or rental on VUDU.

For my experiences, this is one that I watched within the last year and gave some consideration for my No Good Very Bad Movies feature, which was not in itself ignominious distinction. By all my recollections, the reason I passed over it at that point was that it didn’t really stand out from many, many other contenders good and bad. (I suppose Frozen and High Tension ended up representing the respective extremes for the current millennium.) With further reflection, what does set it apart is just how unknown this one is for a modern film with a significant star, in those terms a plausible challenger to Two Evil Eyes as the most truly and unaccountably obscure film I have reviewed. Another potential distinction is that it is very much a mashup, specifically of the different varieties of horror. It is usually counted as supernatural horror, but I find it more like “survival horror” with either psychological or supernatural elements. The paradox is that I have found it difficult to say if that should be counted as a nuance in its favor or simply as being too timid to pick a line. On that among other things, the viewing for this review did not really help.

Moving forward, the things the film has going for it come down to good cinematography and camera work and predictably good acting. On the first point, the film’s visual vocabulary speaks for itself: The wilderness shots are utterly forbidding, with little if any romanticism of nature, while the interior scenes are claustrophobic without exaggerated melodrama. On the latter front, it’s striking that Blunt never simply upstages the other lead or anyone else. As things move along, there is a real building of rapport in spite of multiple revelations that clearly give the lady reason to question the guy’s intentions. What is genuinely unconventional is that the survival situation never becomes a projection of the “relationship”. It becomes clear that the guy is misguided to put it mildly, but the film never asks the viewer to invest in his redemption or demonization. What we see is a flake who doesn’t deserve his fate any more than a happy ending. If there’s a problem, it’s that we are still given more reason to sympathize with him than the heroine who is clearly slated to survive.

That leaves the ghosts, and this is where things get hit or miss. The first few appearances of the phantoms are very effective, but this is to be expected given the noted high standards in play. When the film tries to build on this early moments with effects and gore, it becomes a literal case of “too much and not enough”. The makeup is more convincing and effective on the specters that are clearly intended to look like regular people, and the occasional attempts at jump scares are bluntly telegraphed. The best moments all come from the very bad ghost cop, who transforms by increments from a jerk to an animistic god-demon that seems to personify the cold. Where the story cops out early is that it stretches “ambiguity” to whether the living characters are doing anything but freezing in the car, which spoils the narrative stakes of what would be the most effective moments of the film (especially the death of Bellamy’s character). Something also has to be said about the rating, which is upped to R for absolutely no comprehensible reason. (It’s all the more enraging given what “’70s PG” horror films like Tourist Trap got away with.) There can be little doubt that this was a case where the filmmakers were going for PG-13, and it’s hard to imagine anything that could have placated the ratings police after such an arbitrary verdict. However, there are certainly ways this could have been better if they had gone back and tried to “earn” the rating outright.

That leaves the “one scene”, and this is yet another time I returned the disc before I got this far. Fortunately, there’s one particular scene I thought of several times in the course of this review, which is the appearance of the villain. Partway through, the pair are still thinking of their misadventure as waiting for help while a few odd characters pass by. They are relieved when someone knocks on the window, and we see a smiling patrolman. The lady in particular is immediately relieved, but the cop goes right into a spiel like they are a couple he caught making out, with all the grotesque implications that implies. The pair still take this at face value and scramble to get some pocket money together. Then, in a questionable decision even for a horror movie damsel, the lady leaves the car to deliver the bribe, aside from anything else ignoring his strong insinuations that what he wants isn’t money. I admit I don’t recall exactly what happens from here, but it is an effective sequence that gets more intriguing on cross-examination. Is this a Sixth Sense deal where the ghost still thinks he’s alive? Is he acting out his former misdeeds before moving in for the kill? Or is this already a hallucination or completely visionary experience? It’s the kind of thing that makes a film like this fascinating, but it’s the most conspicuous point where this would have been better without any tomfoolery about what’s “real”.

In closing, I come in my usual course to the rating. I have to say that this is one time where the rating I give is exactly what I planned on before and after. This certainly isn’t a “bad” film, and it definitely deserves to be a lot better known. But it remains very much a “middle of the road” movie, in large part by its own choices, and in those terms it can be more frustrating than a more seriously flawed but ambitious film like Two Evil Eyes or Dead Heat. (Yeah, I need to do something about Treat Williams.) The bottom line, they tried, they did okay and then they went on to better things. That’s good enough for me to finish on a high note. Onward and upward!