A girl and a guy get stuck on a haunted road in 2007's Wind Chill. Although the conception of the film seems like it was mainly motivated by a kind of incel resentment, it has some genuinely creepy qualities before the final act unfortunately decides to explain too much.
Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play the two unnamed leads, credited as just "Girl" and "Guy", which gives the sense of the two standing in for a broader commentary on men and women. They're college students in Pennsylvania and she wants to go home to Delaware for the holidays. Magically, she finds a note on a bulletin board offering a ride to Delaware.
As the two embark on their long journey, she reluctantly starts talking to him and starts to suspect he might not be telling her the truth about himself. This problem pales in comparison, though, to the trouble they get into when the car runs off the road and they get stuck in a snowdrift for the night. At first, she's so freaked out she locks him out of the car but as they start to see increasingly weird supernatural occurrences, she realises she was being silly for not cuddling with him for body warmth.
I think the whole movie began as a metaphor for the writers' grievances with "frigid" women. However, I'm not one to broadly paint incels as terrorists. I've certainly been in the position of a guy who wants a girl who doesn't want him back and it's actually really difficult to come to the point where I feel like not everything about the problem was my fault. The ambiguity and the cultural uneasiness about the problem contribute to the tension in the film and it is perfectly credible to think a lot of people have died on this lonely stretch of road in the winter. When the ghosts are just shadowy figures who won't answer their questions, they're pretty effective, but, as is often the case, they lose a lot of their power when their backstory is exhaustively explained.
Both Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes give good performances and they're both very well cast.
No comments:
Post a Comment