Director Report Card: Larry Fessenden (2006)

4. The Last Winter

We movie nerds can't help but want to break a director's filmography down into tightly knotted collections. It's part of the OCD inherent in dweeb-dom. Lots of filmmakers make actual trilogies but sometimes directors make otherwise unrelated movies linked by themes. So, if you really want to, you can build two different thematic trilogies out of Larry Fessenden's career. “No Telling” begins an eco-horror trilogy that would continues through “Wendigo” and climaxes with “The Last Winter.” Alternatively, “Wendigo” and “The Last Winter” are the first two parts of a thematic trilogy about wendigoes that ends with “Flesh and Bone,” Fessenden's episode of “Fear Itself.” Granted, both of these super specific nerdy ideas will be screwed up if Fessenden ever returns to either of these themes again.

Thanks to recently redefined legal boundaries, the KIK Corporation is now being allowed to drill inside Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A team from the oil company is led by Ed Pollack, with environmentalist James Hoffman tagging along to help approve any of the ideas Pollack and the company has. Hoffman is deeply concerned about the effect global warming is having on the area, as ancient arctic permafrost is beginning to melt. This is confounded when strange things begin to happen at the outpost. Other members of the team start to act erratically. The weather gets weirder. People start to hear and see things that aren't there. Has the melting permafrost unleashed hallucination-causing gases or is something much more sinister now loose?

“The Last Winter” is a horror movie built upon anxieties surrounding global warming and climate change. This made it forward-thinking in 2006 and frighteningly relevant in 2019. Corporate capitalist like Pollock are only interested in exploiting the environment for profit, complaining when environmental concerns interrupt his plans to expedite the drilling. He wraps his actions in empty rhetoric about energy independence but it's clear that money is his prime motivator. Hoffman, meanwhile, is quickly growing hopeless in the face of a rapidly deteriorating environment. “The Last Winter” is impressively fatalistic. It doesn't portray climate change as something that can be changed. The damage has been done and we are doomed because of it. This is a feeling anyone living in 2019, anyone who is paying attention anyway, is very familiar with.

In more than just its ecological themes, “The Last Winter” builds upon other ideas previously presented in “Wendigo.” That movie was set in the dead of winter but near a small town, so its feeling of wintry isolation only went so far. “The Last Winter” is set far within the Alaskan wilderness. It depicts huge, flat fields of seemingly nothing but snow and ice. Humans seem utterly tiny and insignificant when stepping through such endless, empty landscapes... A feeling that is emphasized by the film's frequent use of wide-shots. The excellent sound design focuses in chilly winds blowing outside the windows, only making everyone feel more isolated and alone in this frozen wasteland.

The location goes a long way in “The Last Winter” and ends up contributing to its creepiest sequence. Among the expedition is the young nephew of the head of the drilling company. He is the first person affected by the strangeness about to unfold. He acts erratically, standing in the snow starring at stuff no one else can see. Eventually, he is drawn out into the icy field at night, walking out in the freezing temperature totally naked. He brings a camera with him and his found footage, giving us a brief glimpse at something spectral outside the outpost. At this point, “The Last Winter” effectively captures a creepy sense of uncanniness.

However, Fessenden's approach to the material is ultimately a little too vague. What kind of horror movie is “The Last Winter,” anyway? Is it a movie about oil company employees being threatened by recently unearth ghostly spirits? Or is it a movie about an isolated group being driven crazy by Arctic methane release? “The Last Winter” eventually lays its cards down but it toys with both possibilities for a while. This makes the movie a little too vague at times, especially in later scenes where cast members become violent without provocation. Too often, “The Last Winter” feels like a collection of scenes of people acting weird for pretty much no reason.

Larry Fessenden doesn't really make the kind of horror movies that have a lot of jump scares or loud shock sequence. Even “Wendigo,” the closest thing he's ever done to a straight-up monster movie, was more atmosphere driven than anything else. “The Last Winter” follows that approach for the first part, using the spooky winter isolation and blowing wind to generate a feeling of unease. It does, occasional, try to include a big scare though. Such as a scene where an airplane crashes suddenly into the outpost, killing the pilots instantly and fatally burning another character. That scene really feels like it comes out of nowhere, a big action movie special effect inserted into a film that's a lot more subtle than that.

Continuing this less frantic approach, “The Last Winter” does not feature many of Fessenden's more extreme stylistic quirks. There's certainly none of the manic camera work or overly stylized editing techniques we saw in “Wendigo.” In fact, “The Last Winter” is rather still in its visual composition, effectively making use of the bright and empty location. However, Larry can't help himself a few times. There's at least one shotgun-blast montage of a notebook being presented to us. Later, there's a brief moment of surrealism, as a dying character is carried back to his childhood memories of a less sinister winter.

“The Last Winter” has something else in common with “Wendigo.” The monsters in that movie didn't really work, brought down by some not-so-hot special effects. “The Last Winter” has a similar problem. It also uses the term “wendigo” for its hostile spirits, even though that's an Algonquian word, not an Inuit word. They look kind of similar, being giant ghostly creatures with angry moose heads... However, the CGI used to create the monsters is not very impressive. The spectral creatures work best when seen as only vaguely moving shapes in the night. When they get up in the audience's face, the seams start to show. Truthfully, I'm not sure “The Last Winter” needed an on-screen monster at all. The supernatural element might've been best kept off-camera entirely.

Then again, the CGI moose monsters do contribute to what is, by far, the most effectively sequence in “The Last Winter.” The team is picked off by various forces, internal and external, until only two remain. Hoffman calls his girlfriend back at the lab. She cowers in a closest as crows pick at a near-by dead body. As she talks on the phone with him, she hears the monstrous spirits closing in on him. The next scene has her awakening to water flooding around her ankles and sounds of destruction happening just out of frame. Its an apocalyptic ending, suggesting an end-of-the-world scenario that is equally physical – floods and monsters destroying cities – as it is philosophical – whole groups of people committing suicide in the face of this unstoppable ecological disaster.

A big reason why “The Last Winter” isn't scarier is that the cast of characters never really come to life. Fessenden makes some token attempts to expand the characters, with that old chestnut the love triangle. Hoffman is currently dating Abbey Sellers, one of the scientist working with the oil company. She use to date Pollock. The company man is baffled by what she sees in the emotional, sensitive environmentalist. The two men continue to argue about this connection of their's, even as the marauding moose monsters are closing in around them. It's a rather silly plot point, obviously inserted to beef up the characters some.

Still, the movie does feature a decent cast. Ron Perlman is top-billed as Pollock. This is the kind of role Perlman excels at, a gruff asshole who remains strangely likable largely because he's charming in his smart-ass ways. James LeGros is effectively grim as Hoffman, a man slowly cracking under the pressure of of what he's witnessing. A scene where he explains his atheism is a good moment for both the actor and the character. Kevin Corrigan has a decent role as Motor, the team mechanic whose smart-alack delivery makes him something like the film's comic relief. Connie Nielson, as Abbey, is largely reduced to being the peace-keeper between the men. Nielson is a likable actor though and makes the most of what she's given.

”The Last Winter” was Fessenden's biggest budget yet, the movie costing seven million dollars. The money is definitely on the screen, as that real life location is a big reason why the movie works at all. Ultimately, “The Last Winter” is a movie I want to like more than I actually do. The premise is really cool, the isolated setting is so very creepy, its use of environmental anxieties are potent, and there are several effectively spooky moments. However, the thinly sketched characters and an approach to its supernatural threat that is somehow both too vague and too in-your-face keeps the movie from being sturdier. [Grade: B-]