Film Review: Deftly Lensed ‘Snowman’s Land’ Leaves Audience in the Cold

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CHICAGO – The art of deadpan humor looks deceptively simple to the untrained eye. It’s fairly easy to say ridiculous things while maintaining a straight face. What separates the amateurs from the professionals is a mastery of timing as well as a keen understanding of a character’s interior life. The best deadpan laughs are the ones that allow an inside peek into the human psyche.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

Tomasz Thomson’s 2010 crime thriller, “Snowman’s Land,” evokes forgotten memories of weak Coen Brothers vehicles like “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers.” There’s plenty of remarkable craft on display but little to stoke an audience’s involvement. The film is so deadpan at times that it barely has a pulse, though cinematographer Ralf M. Mendle provides the viewer with so much hauntingly desolate and gorgeously frostbitten imagery that it nearly redeems the naggingly empty experience.

Read Matt Fagerholm’s full review of “Snowman’s Land” in our reviews section.

Jürgen Rißmann stars as a disheveled hit man named Walter, whose eyes convey the weariness of a man who’s seen more than enough and doesn’t care to see much more. In the opening scene, Walter does a monumentally stupid thing, but then curiously goes on to serve as the film’s perceptive straightman. The care and caution that he puts into all of his subsequent decisions makes his initial choice to shoot a man without getting a good look at his face all the more inexplicable. Walter’s botched job causes him to get shipped on a “vacation” to the Carpathian Mountains, where he’s ordered to protect the house of a grouchy crime boss, Berger (Reiner Schöne), from faceless predators lurking in the woods. Walter’s bumbling foolishness quickly evaporates once he’s paired with Mickey (Thomas Wodianka, going for broke), an exceedingly idiotic loudmouth who’s allegedly an old friend of Walter’s, though it’s hard to determine why. Mickey is the sort of walking train wreck that most sensible men would cross a chasm to avoid. Indeed, Walter often looks intent on pushing Mickey over a chasm himself, yet he turns out to be a more softhearted gentleman than one would assume. He’s mainly resigned to staring in grim silence as Mickey continues to dig a deeper and deeper hole that threatens to bury them both.

Continue reading for Matt Fagerholm’s full “Snowman’s Land” review.

Jürgen Rißmann stars in Tomasz Thomson’s Snowman’s Land.
Photo credit: Music Box Films