Frost (2012) Review

FrostEveryone reviewing, marketing or even discussing Finish found footage horror Frost will ultimately use the same sentence “It’s The Thing meets The Blair Witch Project” and although this statement does sum up the basic elements of the movie – ice, snow, arguments, possessed humans, monsters and jerky camera work – it is nowhere near even approaching the excellence of either of those two films.

The plot follows filmmaker Gunnar (Björn Thors) who journeys to a remote area of the Arctic Circle to visit his on-again off-again girlfriend Agla (Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir) who happens to be doing research on a base there.

Frost

Deciding to document her work and their relationship Gunnar is glad when the pair are left alone by Agla’s colleges however when the other guys fail to return the couple start to worry. This fret turns to fear during then night when they hear piercing screams from the snow and see strange flashing lights.Frost

Exiting the camp they find a trail of blood and make the fateful decision to journey out into the subzero nothingness to try and find the missing men and the source of the strangeness that seems to be infringing on them more and more as each moment passes.

As you can tell from the synopsis above Frost is a film where very little happens, either in an attempt to heighten the reality or in the hopes that the viewer will be so bored the minimal scares will have a maximum affect.

It’s thirty minutes before we witness anything remotely interesting, unless of course you are a fan of Icelandic actors arguing then snogging, then arguing again, leading to more snogging every so often stopping one of the two tasks to exclaim “Mitä tuo ääni oli” – which is ‘what was that noise’ to us mono-linguists.

Frost

Horror wise the deliberate ambiguity on what evil lurks under the snow is more infuriating than interesting and the jumps are too few and far between to make up for such a weak storyline.

Unfortunately director Reynir Lyngdal rolls out all the tired and testing tropes of faux documentaries with shaky shots, shouting, running with the camera. He even uses the glitchy video footage when the nastiness is near – a technique we have seen a million times before.

Frost Frost 2012

Sadly the one innovation and twist which occurs 1 hour in is not enough to rectify the rest of the film, especially as it abruptly ends 15 minutes later for no real reason other than perhaps everyone got bored and decided to go home.

A failure of a film proving that found footage horrors in any language are equally as awful, Frost simply leaves you cold and feeling numb. My advice is watch The Thing and The Blair Witch Project instead.

Movie Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ 

Trailer:

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Alex Humphrey

Alex studied film at the University of Kent and went on to work for Universal Pictures in their Post Room gaining an inside look at the movie industry from the very bottom. Constantly writing reviews in everything from local magazines to Hip Hop sites Alex honed his critical skills even spending a brief period as a restaurant critic. Read more

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