film reel image

film reel image

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Wind Chill 2007 * * Stars

CHILL FACTORED

Two college students embark on a trip to Delaware via a rideshare. It's winter, they're complete blow-ins (or so you think), and they become sidetracked a la a shortcut on some bummed out road. It all goes down like some choked soft drink in 2007's Wind Chill, my latest write-up.

So yeah, one character in "Chill" quips, "are we lost or something?" Something like that, in the middle of nowhere, with damaged car in tote, in the company of temps about to dip to below freezing. Wind Chill, well it seems like a fitting title don't you think?

Anyway "Chill" takes place in snowy Pennsylvania, playing it straight as a thriller until it doesn't, getting all Strangers on us. Minus a standard opening twenty minutes of boy meets girl banality, the film eventually becomes cloaked in supernatural mumbo jumbo, lacking in suspense yet gaining in ennui. First you see some ghosts, then you don't. Sometimes there's a creepy dream sequence, then it's back to spent materiality. Maybe there's a flashback, or maybe it's just a flash in the pan (natch). "They say when you freeze to death, it's just like going to sleep". The sleep part I can attend to.

Wind Chill stars Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes as nameless non-denizens, one miserable, the other kooky and rather stalkerish. As they try to hold out among the specters, the food rationing, the pink elephants, and the frozen tundra, we the viewer sadly experience a psychological slog, an endless exercise in total horror-filled manipulation if you will. I mean it just goes on and on and well, gets more misguided with the Blunt persona surviving with ne'er a scratch on her. Movies, well they shouldn't be exhausting and emptily dapper, they should be entertaining. That's two sheets out of 4 to this "wind". 

Written by Jesse Burleson

No comments:

Post a Comment