The Snowman

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, An Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on this show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. We're doing something a little different today on the show. So I have done in the past Netflix Roulette, where I just pick a random movie on Netflix and talk about it. Today we're talking about The Snowman, which is currently the number one movie on Netflix. Mister police, you could have saved her. I gave you all the clues you might remember this movie from a million mem and gifts and whatever kind of making fun of the Snowman that like the creepy messages with the Snowman drawing and jud generally the idea of like a Snowman serial killer movie.

1:11 I was sort of pleasantly surprised to see it number one on Netflix. In a weird way, I was like rooting for this movie even though I hadn't seen it. I knew it had been critically maligned. Right it has six percent on Round Tomatoes, definitely was considered a box office flop relative to its budget. Incredible cast like seriously great Michael Fossbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlie Gainsborg, Val Kilmer, Toby Jones, Chloe Sevigner, j K. Simmons, director Thomas Alfredson let the right one in Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy executive produced by Martin Scorsese, as like, could this movie possibly be not good? With all these talented people involved? So I wanted to find out is it worth watching? Let's find out. So the movie starts and I'll warred you before I get into pitres boilers. So the movie starts with this guy coming to test this kid on Norwegian history and if he gets the answer wrong, he hits the kid's mom, which is so over the top that it almost plays Honestly, I kind of played like comical, like I think I laughed like because it's so bleak, right, it just was. I don't know how if you watch it, I bused to know what you think. Maybe I'm just sick of the head, But to be it actually just didn't land right. It almost played like so overtop became kind of funny, and the kids upset and he makes a snowman, and then there's an implied rape of his mother by this guy, and then there's like this POV shot of the snowman looking through the window as if the snowman is alive, and it's it's just hard to explain unless you watch it. But this starts what is a

2:46 very consistent issue with the movie, which is that snowmen are intrinsically silly. So even though what's happening in and around snow men in this movie is extremely anytime you cut to a snowman, I'm probably gonna laugh, it's just it's just is a funny image contrasted with murder, like a serial killing, right, which is what this movie is about. Anyway. In the opening kind of teaser section, the idea is that this guy I had to look on Wikipedia to make sure I understood this correctly. This guy is a cop and the kid that we're seeing at the beginning is like his illegitimate child that he's head with this woman. The woman is psychologically destroyed by this relationship and drives her car into a lake and drowns while her son watches, and you know, and he does obviously he is also psychologically destroyed. And this is all before the opening credits, so pretty active first five minutes of this movie.

3:39 We jumped to present day worth Michael Fossbender. I think it's a natural assumption that he's the adult version of the kid. That's what I assumed. There's a guy cleaning dry rot out of Michael foss Spender's apartment. He doesn't know who that guy is, so he shows up the apartment, sees him, takes out his gun and shoots at him, and the guy doesn't seem that upset about it. I don't know. I think if I shot at I was working on my house, I think he would be pretty pissed. He seemed to take it in stride. You know, this speaks to a lot of the things that we're talked about with this movie. And I'm going to get to what the director said, which kind of explains this stuff. There's some weird stuff for this movie that you're like, what's going on here, But then there's moments that peek through of like a legitimately good movie. So, for example, Fosbender goes to cafeteria, moves a chair in the cafeteria to make sure no one sits with him. That's a great little character detail, right, And then he gets the creepy letter with the drawing of the snowman again in live action, right, like physically seeing it and seeing the camera to kind of, you know, go down until you see the little drawing of the snowman. It just I don't know, it's maybe I'm just childish, but for whatever I cannot take it seriously. And I wonder if on the page it was a lot easier to like be wrapped up into it and find it scary, but when you actually have to literalize it, it's just hard to take it seriously. And here's another example. So we see a woman that's like walking alone to her car, which is like classic serial killer set up, right, and she gets hit by a random snowball from

5:10 nowhere and she sort of looks out like, oh, who threw that? And she sort of like smiles like, oh, someone's being playful, and obviously we know it's like this is like the prelude to a murder most likely. Again, like it's just hard to find that scary. Now, some of this might be explained by this quote that the director tells us Alfredson gave to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. According to Yahoo UK, he said they didn't shoot everything that he wanted on this it's an adaptation of a book of a joanesbo crime thriller. He said that ten to fifteen percent of the script remained unfilmed, causing major gaps in the story. He said, quote, our shoot time in Norway was way too short and we didn't get the whole story with us, and when we started cutting, we discovered that a lot was missing. Quote. It's like when you're making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing, so you don't see a whole picture. He also said that when they got funding, they kind of rushed into production. He said, quote it happened very abruptly. Suddenly we got noticed that we had the money and we could start the shoot in London. This may explain why it takes forty minutes to get to this kind of father's son relationship between Fosbender and Oleg, who is the son of Fosbender's character's ex girlfriend and kind of the only reason to care about Fosbender now at this point I'm about forty minutes in the movie, we're gonna get to kind of like the first big showy murder. So I guess if you want to avoid spoilers, like this is a spoiler alert, although to spoil my own review, this is going to

6:41 be the first time in the history of watched this tonight, I'm going to say, maybe don't watch this tonight. Yeah. If there's one show that or a movie that I would suggest you just keep listening and probably not watch the film, I think it's this one. And I'm sad to say that there's so many times to people involved in this. I know how hard it is to make a movie period, not much less a good movie. So I'm not saying any of this to like knock the movie. I just it's just the reality of it. If you watch this movie, like, there's a reason it's six percent of on Tomatoes. But I do think it's a really interesting movie to kind of unpack. So it's almost like I've done the homework for you. If you were curious about this movie, but you don't want to spend two hours watching it and you want to know kind of like what happened, what are the merits of it. What was the movie that could have been that sort of peeks through, like I'm going to sort of walk you through all that and the rest of this episode. All right, so you've been warned. Forty seven minutes in Chloe seven, Yer gets decapitated by essentially the device in the counselor if anybody saw that movie, it's an electrified wire that sort of tightens around your head, which I have to say, much scarier than a snowman. And then her killer places her body like and a snowman, which again just looks a little silly. Michael Foss, spennor Recca Ferguson go to like check on her, they actually had already went.

7:58 They go back, they discover she's a twins. Just general rule I would say of fiction, try to avoid twins. You know, I think twins always play a little silly. It's tough for that not to play like soap opera silly. I would love to know if anyone's listening to this has actually read the book, because again, maybe all this stuff works great in a novel. I could imagine it working in a novel much easier. Another example, so Foster Finder's Character's name is Harry Hole. That's his name right now on the page. It's alliteration. It sort of looks nice just look at it visually, but if you hear someone say it in a line of dialogue, it feels like a lethal like a it feels like a naked gun movie, because they'll be like, hey, is Harry Hole there? Like what are you making a crank call? Yeah, it's just again, it's what are those things? Or the translation from the page to the screen is challenging. What's amazing about this movie is like everyone is so overqualified, right incredibly, I mean down to the director of photography, the editor, or like all the actors. I've made a bunch of low budget films, you know, as a developing executive, that were shot in like eleven days, twelve days, fifteen days, and when you're making a movie on that short of a schedule, you're swimming uphill. First of all, just get the movie done, much less make it a good movie. And it's almost watching this film, I was reminded of our challenges and trying to make a movie and let's say twelve days right where you're like, we're just trying to get this done. It's almost as if this movie with all these stars somehow did not have enough time to shoot, it doesn't make sense, like was it.

9:31 It seems like there's like a budget issue here or something like why did they not have the time they needed to get everything that they had to get. It's weird, but I mean again, you can clearly see it when you watch the film, right. It made me think of in twenty eleven, in the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles signed like every free agent possible, right, all of the coveted free agents, and in training camp they interviewed Vince Young, and Vince Young said, wow, yeah, no, it's like we got the dream team, and then they immediately went They started the season like one and four and they finished the season eight and eight. That's what this movie is like. It's like, let's get all these amazingly talented people together, but somehow the team did not mesh, and it's just it's just kind of all over the place. But again, every once in a while, you see the promise of the film. For example, Fossbender forgets to take Old Leg on a trip. He promised he was gonna take him too, and it's almost like arrested development. Like Old legs, like standing somewhere with all this stuff he was gonna take on this trip and fox Spenders aren't there, and and fos Spenders ex girlfriend's new guy calls the kid and takes the fall for fox Spender for the good of the kid, which is a very nice thing to him to do, and just an interesting character moment that really worked. Again, I'm gonna warn you spoilers because we're gonna really get in here. Rebecca Ferguson dies and she's the second lead and you know, a pretty big name in the movie, and that was pretty ballsy.

10:58 And then kind of like the whole run of the end is so good that for a second, I'm like, maybe this movie is good, Like it almost got me back in. The extremely nice new boyfriend of Michael Fosspender's former lover is the Killer's He was the kid in the beginning of the movie, not fos Spender. He was that kid by having him do something for a fos Spender that was so nice, so legitimately nice. I totally did not suspect him, and so it was a genuine surprise when he was revealed as the killer, and his character motivation actually really nicely connects with Fosbender's character. He was a kid who was abandoned and so he's killing people that it has something to do with like abortion clinics. It's basically his attitude is like, you know, someone has to take care of the children because he was not taken care of. So his attitude towards Fossbender is, look, you have this woman who loves you. If this little kid who looks at you is like father figure, why are you abandoning them? Why can't you take responsibility?

11:56 Which is true, he's right, So it sort of forces Fosbender to like admit to his faults and it's that all all that character stuff really works, and then the final confrontation between them is gorgeously photographed on this frozen Lake story comes full circle. The villain, you know, false to the frozen lake and dies just like his mother. All that worked really well. There's like a good ten or fifteen minute run at the end of this movie that's actually really good, so you can see where it could have been a good movie. But while it has effective elements like that, it also has kind of weird, random feeling stuff. There's a very abrupt, dry humping scene that occurs between Fosbender and Charlie Gainsbourg. It kind of starts and stops for you. You're like, what is happening here? There's a side note between this and Alice Darling, which I previously reviewed on the show Dry Humping really making a comeback in cinema. I feel like this movie is like, I wonder if David Fincher watches this movie and tells people like, this is why I am the way I am, because you know, Fincher is so obsessive to a crazy degree about getting every little thing right, and it feels like this movie is kind of in an opposite boat, meaning that you know, maybe if they got that twenty percent more of the scripts or whatever, it would have been there, and maybe if, you know, maybe if there was like just a more cohesive attention to detail and the continuity of tone and things of that nature, you know, it could have been considerably more effective.

13:26 All that being said, though, I think the Snowman thing was always going to be funny. I don't care, Like, there's no way you could tell me brutal murder. Snap cut to Snowman with like a smiley like a face and arms and stuff that you're not got to laugh. I just think that that was gonna be a tough thing to overcome, no matter who made this movie. So yeah, I mean apologies to everyone involved in The Snowman. But I guess I don't feel too bad about this because the director has himself said that you know about the movie's flaws and why they are there. I hate to knock any movie, you know. I think even even an ineffective movie is going to have something that's worth seeing, which is totally the case here. By the way, there are definitely like three to four like legit good sequences in this film. But yeah, I mean number one movie on Netflix. Yeah, I have to be honest and say, probably don't watch this tonight. So this is the first, maybe only we'll see if I do more Netflix Roulette, we'll see how it goes, but only episodes so far, where ironically I'm gonna say don't watch this tonight. That is the show for today. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I want to give a little note. I got some nice um listener comments supporting my love for Syrianna, so I guess I'm not alone in that, And yeah, I really appreciate everyone who you know reaches out. It's it's great to have sort of discourse with the listeners, so thank you for doing that. That is the show for today. As always, you can find me on Twitter at Benimore Dan Instagram, watch this tonight ticktime, watch

15:00 this tonight podcast. You can shoot me an email Dan avoidchemedia dot com, or you can join our Facebook group. Until next time, Bye bye m M.