One bad film spoils the Hole series.
The Norwegian detective Harry Hole (alright, alright, get that out of your system) is one of the most popular crimefighters in the modern era of mystery novels. But you wouldn’t know it by watching his first feature film. Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of the serial killer thriller The Snowman is a generic detective story that can’t even stand out against its own icy backdrops.
Michael Fassbender plays Harry Hole, a struggling alcoholic and famous Oslo detective with a supportive ex-girlfriend, Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg), her teenaged son Oleg (Michael Yates), and nothing else in his life. When a new investigator at the precinct, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), tells Harry that a series of disappearances may be connected, and might even be the work of a serial killer, Harry dives in. And when disembodied heads start popping up on the top of snowmen, he realizes he’s in deeper than he thought.
The Snowman introduces a frightening serial killer and then does what all mysteries do: populates the story with one red herring after another. Here’s a lascivious businessman, played by J.K. Simmons. Now let me introduce the creepy abortion clinic doctor, played by David Dencik. Oh and by the way, here’s a jilted husband, played by James D’Arcy. And have you noticed this detective with very little screen time, but played by suspiciously recognizable character actor Toby Jones?
Tomas Alfredson, the director of Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, knows how to photograph snow better than anybody, but that doesn’t automatically make him the best director for The Snowman. He’s an intellectual, even clinical filmmaker and this particular story requires more sensitivity than he can muster. Each character, though impressively cast, is left treading water by a by-the-numbers storyline that gives them few, if any opportunities to express themselves unless it’s directly related to the next plot point. The Snowman is not a short movie and there are a lot of dead zones that could have been filled with character, humor, affection, or anything else that’s recognizably humane.
What may be worse is that The Snowman is a story about a horrifying and gruesome serial killer, and Tomas Alfredson is one of the least theatrical storytellers on the planet. The script has misdirects and jump scares baked into it, and Alfredson still can’t get a rise out of us. Early scenes of a potential victim being stalked and - cliché! - it’s not the killer (yet) play out with all the disinterest of a tech rehearsal, and most of the red herrings mentioned above go rotten very quickly.
Tomas Alfredson seems more interested in the new iPads that Harry and Katrine get from work than he does with their actual lives. Katrine’s obsession with The Snowman should be driving this story forward, and her investigation matches Harry’s in its depth, but she’s treated as a stray plot point, and one that’s all too easy to abandon. By the end the filmmakers apparently care so little about her that they forgot to reveal, conclusively, her fate.
But more than anything, The Snowman fails Harry Hole. He’s the star of a popular and successful series of novels and if you only saw this movie, you’d probably have no idea why. In The Snowman, he’s just another in a long line of tortured detectives who engage with a grandiose serial killer, collect clues, catch someone telling a lie, and eventually find themselves in mortal danger. Michael Fassbender is too interesting an actor to be saddled with a screenplay that strips his character of any interesting qualities.
The Verdict
The Snowman had two jobs: to be a good thriller, and to make us want more. It’s handsomely photographed and it has a great cast, but it doesn’t accomplish either of these goals. The Snowman is so cold it’s frostbitten, and all the interesting bits seem to have fallen off already.
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