Festival Report by Andres Guardia
It is quite a pleasure to be able to see the beautiful vastness of Canada’s wilderness on the big screen, a pleasure successfully granted by A Fire in the Cold Season, which consequently does the heart of Canadian nature great justice. Ironically, the feature film deals with the grotesque horrors of Canadian crime found specifically in Newfoundland but is able to effectively juxtapose urban crime with rural beauty. A Fire in the Cold Season, directed by Justin Oakey, follows Scott, a secluded trapper, and his discovery of a body on the bank of a river. The mysterious individual is later revealed to be Keith, a man connected with a drug syndicate whose pregnant wife, Mona, is now left all alone. In feeling connected and responsible for the death of her husband, Scott begins to help Mona without question, providing her with firewood and company. However, the more Scott gets involved in the matter of Keith’s death, the deeper he gets into the underworld of crime – inevitably leading both Scott and Mona to face a realm of violence.
As a crime thriller, the film delivers powerful scenes of raw suspense; however, it does not solely rely on explicit and graphic visuals to create a shivering effect in the audience. While there are numerous terrifying and exciting moments using blood-splatter special effects, the film also includes many riveting scenes of subtle suspense. For instance, by the use of a simple effective transition, the film conveys a horrifying moment where a man is burned alive in his truck, perfectly accompanied by an ominous score. The thrill of this film shares a lot of similarities to that of a Jeremy Saulnier feature, such as Blue Ruin (2013) or Green Room (2015), and deservingly belongs on the same level of suspense (the director and producer of A Fire in the Cold Season even told me in a Q&A how they thought of Blue Ruin during some of their shoots). Even though the film predominantly deals with the dark, crime infested side of Newfoundland, the bleak and graphic sequences are balanced out beautifully with stunning extreme long shots of the Canadian Wilderness.
What makes the film for me is the juxtapositions between nature and a world of violence. One sequence that stands out is a fight scene that deliberately cuts to a panning shot of the wilderness before one of the fighters is killed. Shots and sequences such as this illustrate a thought-provoking comparison between the human world of crime and the violence found in nature. The idea of the hunter being the hunted acts as an effective thematic device that illustrates a world flipped on its head. As director Justin Oakey described in the Q&A, he wanted to show a part of Newfoundland that went outside the conventions of how people see the province. This is a Newfoundland where the borders between the beautiful and the grotesque start to fuse together, leaving behind a stunning product that is both horrifying and remarkable.
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