One Scandi-noir howler after another
The Snowman
15 cert, 119 min
Dir Tomas Alfredson Starring
Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Val Kilmer, Chloë Sevigny, JK Simmons, Silvia Busuioc, Jamie Clayton
The Snowman goes wrong quickly, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, from whose seventh Harry Hole thriller this is taken, has met with a fate almost as grim as the film’s multiple victims, whose severed body parts are used to accessorise the killer’s favoured call-sign: a menacing snowman placed near the scene.
It’s a steep fall for the director, Tomas Alfredson, who has assembled a cast almost as meaty as the one he put together for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Michael Fassbender is Nesbø’s loose-cannon detective, whose actual methods of investigation involve stumbling on information much more often than figuring it out.
A missing mother in an Oslo suburb kicks the story off: she’s abducted in the night, leaving her daughter and husband (James D’arcy) awaiting news. First, though, the film sets up its killer’s motivation with a backstory about a boy left orphaned when his mother drove on to a frozen lake and stayed strapped in as he escaped.
Past and present, alas, are finessed as elegantly as an ice-rink relay race with skates missing. The film’s grisliest moments get sprung with an arbitrariness that prompts guffaws – there’s none of that creeping dread from The Silence of the Lambs, just sudden scenes of a shotgun blowing someone’s head off and a sphere of ice being plonked on top. All the controlled symbolism from Alfredson’s vampire chiller Let the Right One In has flown out the window, too. With all due respect to Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini for their great work on other films, this palimpsest of a script is a case of Let the Wrong One In.
Fassbender attempts a sorrowful sort of turn, brought to his feet only by the sad old state of the world. But the role of Hole is so wonkily inserted into the plot, you regularly lose track of which lead he’s chasing up, and who’s a witness or a suspect, or what Toby Jones and Chloë Sevigny have to do with anything. If The Snowman merely aimed to max out on swooping helicopter shots of frosty Norwegian harbourfronts, and otherwise to be abominable, consider the job done. TR