Christmas 2020: Let It Snow (2020)

North America basically invented the slasher movie. Yes, Italy made the first ones and the genre has its roots in Italian gialli. Yet the slasher movie never would've become the phenomenon it was without “Halloween.” In the intervening decades, the slasher disease has even spread to other countries. We've seen Japanese slashers, Indian slasher, and Norwegian slashers. Now a film with a masked terrorizer wielding bladed weapons has emerged from the Ukraine and Georgia. “Let It Snow” isn't just the first stalk-and-slash flick from this region of Eastern Europe, it's also a Christmas-set horror flick. So, even if the reviews were pretty soft, I knew I had to give it a look.

Mia and Max are American thrill-seekers on Christmas vacation. They have traveled to the snowy mountaintops of Georgia for a weekend of high-risk snowboarding. Max intends on proposing to Mia on this trip. They seek out an especially isolated peak known as the Black Ridge. Despite numerous warnings from the locals, about how many people have disappeared or died on the Black Ridge, the couple ventured ahead anyway. Soon, the two are separated and Mia is pursued by a threatening person on a snowmobile, in a concealing black ski suit. She attempts to survive the harsh environment, and her pursuer, and find her boyfriend. 

It's easy to see why someone would look at the snowy mountaintops of Georgia and decide to build a horror movie around it. Those endless slopes of pure white snow, far from civilization and stretching in all directions, is certainly striking. In its best moments, “Let It Snow” utilizes that vast and intimidating emptiness for a chilly sense of isolation. Shots of people, seeming so small, wandering across the snow, are certainly effective. Sadly, “Let It Snow” is not always so well shot. Director Stanislav Kapralov sometimes slips into disorientating shaky-cam. The decent use of lighting, such as in a scene set within the killer's lair, can't make up for a big flaw. That, when Kapralov wants to turn the tension up, the film becomes hard to follow.

“Let It Snow” was sold to me as a slasher flick but this is, ultimately, an inaccurate description. This is a body count flick with grand body count of one. The film has a cool looking villain. A killer clad totally in black, save for an identity-concealing helmet and goggles, is memorable enough. Especially when set against all that pure white snow. Yet the masked marauder never actually does anything. Mia spends almost the entirety of “Let It Snow” wandering away from her attacker. Since there's not much to do on an icy mountain, that means very little actually happens in “Let It Snow.” The film is less than ninety minutes long but feels far longer, thanks to a general lack of interesting events. 

Truthfully, “Let It Snow” is better described as a survival film. The film hopes to derive tension from Mia's predicament, as she wanders through the harsh wilderness and attempts to survive. There's a big problem with this though: Mia isn't very interesting. Ivanna Sakhno seems like she could probably give a decent performance. Yet Mia is such a thin character. We never learn why she's attracted to Max, their love being more informed than shown. Her back story is never elaborated on and we learn very little about her personality. It's hard to be invested in whether someone will live and die when we hardly know them. 

You get the impression that the filmmakers behind “Let It Snow” had a killer location and tried to weave a story around it. No clear identity ever emerges from the film. Early scenes in the hotel lay down the foreboding foreshadowing too much. Divergences on the mountain top feel like hopeless padding of a thin premise. The Christmas setting is cool but doesn't amount to much besides the occasional sighting of a tree or the title-lending carol. It's a movie that's overall quite dull, that has very little to offer. Hopefully, the next slasher flick to come out of the Ukraine is better than this one. [5/10]