Rama's Screen

Think Open Water but skiing and instead of getting stuck in the middle of the ocean, you’re stuck high above the ground, on a chairlift, in freezing temperature, and there you have FROZEN. Writer/director Adam Green who brought us… Hatchet has crafted this terrifying survival story. All your comfort is gone and natural elements are against you, FROZEN is one helluva scary ride to the most excruciating death you can possibly imagine.

A typical day on the slopes turns into a chilling nightmare for three snowboarders when they get stranded on the chairlift before their last run. As the ski patrol switches off the night lights, they realize with growing panic that they’ve been left behind dangling high off the ground with no way down.
With the resort closed until the following weekend and frostbite and hypothermia already setting in, the trio is forced to take desperate measures to escape off the mountain before they freeze to death. Once they make their move, they discover with horror that they have much more to fear than just the frigid cold. As they combat unexpected obstacles, they start to question if their will to survive is strong enough to overcome the worst ways to die?

3 actors is all it’s needed.. Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore, and Kevin Zegers. All of them give excellent performances, from confident, to worried, to frightened, and desperate. What director Green all has to do is take away their comfort slowly but surely. Starting with the fact that there’s no way they can go down without hurting their legs. They can’t go to the bathroom, they’re fighting starvation, there’s no cell phone, their faces suffer from frostbite, nobody’s around to help them out, down below is a pack of hungry wolves that are like sharks circling a drop of blood. Things get worse and worse by the minute. On top of that, the dark and the cold get to test their will to survive. There’s going to be some scenes that will make you cringe.
Is FROZEN original? In a way it is, if you consider the setting but I think you can apply this concept by placing the characters in any isolated situation.

What makes FROZEN excel is Green’s way of making that awful condition as a way for the characters to bond. The stories they share is surprisingly heartfelt and mainly because psychologically speaking, humans tend to spill their gut or confess or even they’d at least open up to others when faced with a certain impending death or calamity. I think it’s great that Green gets to explore this about these three characters, so FROZEN not just your usual ‘let’s see who gets to die first’ slasher/horror flick. Two best friends with one girlfriend, there’s jealousy, there’s tension, there’s regret, you want to just to take your anger out on the next person and that’s just our normal appropriate response. And the music by Andy Garfield adjusts itself to the emotion at hand. I’m impressed with the cinematography and whatever tricks that Green pulled to give you that rotating view or scope of the three characters just sitting there way up high in the middle of an empty resort.

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