Below Zero (2021)

Below Zero arrives from Spain with a prisoner transport van, a frozen lake, and no apparent interest in telling us how to live. The premise is elemental. A transfer convoy is ambushed, the escort is slaughtered, and the surviving officer must keep a handful of convicts alive while the temperature and a sniper both close in. The cold here is a physical problem to be solved, not a metaphor for anything. Nobody stands in for the planet. Nobody delivers a speech.

The cast is Spanish because the film is Spanish, which is to say the production sourced its actors from the country that made it and left the matter there. The prisoners are men. The officers are men. The moral questions are the old ones: who deserves to die, and who has earned the right to decide. One convict turns out to have raped and killed a young girl, and the man hunting him through the snow is her father. This is fuel for a chase, not an occasion for instruction. The film shows no interest in the social conditions that produced anyone. It points the truck at the ice and drives. The screenplay has no thesis to advance and no audience to educate. It has a road, a blizzard, and a man with a shotgun.

Eighty-eight percent positive from eight critics and forty-seven million Netflix accounts in the first month: an audience for competence, plainly. The film runs lean, kills its characters without ceremony, and never pauses to explain what we should feel about any of it. The last shot, an officer clearing out his locker and walking away from a career, comes as close to a statement as anything here, and it declines to make one. There is something bracing in that restraint. There is also something hollow. A well-built machine, and no plaque on it.