I must admit, it did kind of get me to thinking about how this sort of tour flattens what a guy who experimented as much as him in the studio does so that the songs sound a little more the same; I've been digging out the CDs and listening to them since, they're a bit more playful that way and much less likely to end dah-dah-dah-daaahh (mimes exaggerated strokes at the guitar).
After that… Well, there's not a lot in theaters right now that promises to be more exciting than the last week of the baseball season that includes playing the team that there's an outside chance of overtaking to win the division. The Sox didn't play the Blue Jays quite well enough for that, but seeing that Friday's game at Fenway was on Apple TV and they were giving away souvenirs, I impulsively bought a ticket. I didn't immediately figure out why there was a ten-dollar difference between prices for tickets in the same section right away until I realized the two seats behind me were behind a big ol' support pillar. A good time, though - it was Japan night, so I got a cap with cherry blossoms on it, there was mochi at the concession stand, and Daisuke Matsuzaka was in town to throw out the first pitch. Coincidentally, Masataka Yoshida got three hits on the way to a 4-3 walk-off win.
Sunday was the last regular-season game of the year and I'd already bought tickets. I got there at the last minute so I saw that Niko Matsuzaka was singing the national anthem but not that she was Daisuke's daughter, which was cool. The game itself was kind of weird, like both teams were playing to avoid injury or were well aware that seeding weirdness meant the loser would get to face Cleveland instead of New York. Not throwing the game, but not trying too hard. The Sox wound up winning by the same 4-3 score, and they're in New York City right now.
That ended at about the right time to get to Dead of Winter without waiting around for long, which is fortunate, because despite a lot of previews, it only showed up at Boston Common in a sort of screen-filling deal. I liked it, though, and will tell you why just a little way down.
So, yeah, not a lot of movies here or on my Letterboxd account, and it may stay that way for as long as the Sox are in the playoffs. October for you!
Dead of Winter
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 September 2025 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link)
I've been recounting this anecdote for 20-odd years now, but one of the great, really useful things I've learned from a festival Q&A is "you'll be amazed who you can land for your movie if you write a good role for an older actor". Here, that means a little no-nonsense thriller that has the bones of being a pretty good movie has the chance to really be something once Emma Thompson gets involved: She isn't going to make it into something it's not, but it sure becomes something close to the best version of itself.
She plays Barb, a recent widow returning to Lake Hilda, the place her late husband Karl took her ice-fishing for their first date. Having trouble finding it, she asks the man (Marc Mechaca) at the only cabin for miles for directions, noting a couple things that seem kind of sketchy but figuring she's best off minding her business, at least until she spots him chasing a teenage girl (Laurel Marsden) through the woods. There's no signal for her phone and the police might be hours away in this sparsely-populated portion of northern Minnesota, so she aims to rescue the girl without much hesitation, and she'll soon find that the man's wife (Judy Greer) is the one driving the whole thing.
Screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson & Dalton Leeb and director Brian Kirk (who has mostly worked in television but also directed the pretty darn good 21 Bridges are impressively efficient laying things out in the beginning: They trust Thompson to put Barb's story on her face and how she interacts with her environment, use the opening titles to emphasize that she is getting far away from help and that the weather can get pretty nasty up there, before laying out the situation. Given that an independent thriller like this is likely to spend just a week or two in theaters, if that, before streamers pick it up, the filmmakers are unusually insistent that you watch what's going on rather than reinforcing events with dialogue that will keep the viewer only paying half-attention caught up. They also do nice work with scale and sound and how the location plays into it: The lakes are wide open but sounds carry, and the old-growth forests are tall enough that getting the attention of someone beyond that wall takes effort.
It's a great place to locate a small, impressive cast. Emma Thompson is the star that leaps out, and for a while one can't help notice the incongruity of her doing that sort of midwestern accent and how enthusiastic she seems to be about playing this character who is a very particular sort of American, but it winds up getting one to look at her and see she's kind of doing a lot to convey how simultaneously sensible and over her head Barb is, or how she's coping with her loss in the middle of all this. She's often wearing big, distracting emotions on her sleeve but it in a way that feels like an ordinary person feeling ruffled. She plays well off Laurel Marsden as Leah and Marc Mechaca in their confrontations, while he and Judy Greer pair off as the sort of villains that land in the sweet spot between "dumb crime" and scenery-chewing maniacs, all the more dangerous because one sees how they could be played for laughs but aren't. I like Gaia Wise & Cúán Hosty-Blaney as the young Barb & Karl, too, even if Wise winds up in "I know what young Emma Thompson looked like and it's not that" (though, to be fair, I know what 30-year-old Emma Thompson looks like better than 20-year-old Emma Thompson); they're not complicated but feel like complete people.
The small cast makes for a tight game of cat-and-mouse, with the challenges for Barb and Leah well-designed, allowing their foes to be dangerous without being unbelievably clever. What's going on is laid out for the audience fairly well without being explicit about it, which means that when it's revealed to Barb and Leah, the final connecting of dots reinforces their shock and horror rather than making it feel like they're slow to catch up; that it's weird and deranged and probably never going to work just makes the whole thing more tragic, and the filmmakers clearly get this. That genre awareness isn't always a net positive, though - the hunters who show up toward the end overexplain more in their ten minutes than the rest of the movie does and Barb seeing how it's going to end badly with them is a bit too clever.
They also aren't really part of what holds the rest of the movie together in ways that a lesser thriller might not cohere: It is not taking death for granted or treating it as a thing that just moves this sort of story along. Barb, of course, is recently widowed, and the brief flashbacks that show her last days with Karl cast a shadow; Leah has attempted suicide, which is why Greer's kidnapper can justify her plan as she fears for her own survival. One wonders whether Marc Mechaca's husband has not faced what that means, really, until he is staring death in the face himself, and it's interesting to see how he reacts when in that position.
Do not misunderstand, this movie isn't a meditation on mortality cleverly disguised as a suspense film; ruminations almost never derail what is, by and large, a movie focused on giving Barb problems to solve and how she is able to solve them. It's a straightforward genre movie, but one that's had a little thought put into it and executed well enough to command one's full attention.
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