Frozen (2010)

Adam Green's Frozen, which arrived in 2010 and shares nothing with a certain animated musical beyond a title and a low ambient temperature, strands three young skiers on a chairlift above a New England resort and then methodically removes their options. It premiered at Sundance, where audience members reportedly fainted, a detail that tells us more about the human vasovagal response than about the film's cultural ambitions. Those ambitions are modest and entirely honorable: make the room cold, make the audience squirm, kill a likable person with wolves.

For the purposes of this classification, the picture is a clean sheet. The trio is white, and the film never pauses to consider what that means or might mean. Dan and Joe bicker over a girlfriend in the manner of college roommates, which is a triangle of sorts, though not the kind that generates commentary. Parker is the last one standing, and her endurance is framed as a matter of frostbite, cable tension, and luck. When she sues the resort in a cameo appended to a later film, the gesture reads as litigation, not as a reckoning with corporate indifference. The wolves are wolves. The snow is snow.

There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where the movie turns to the camera and asks us to be better. The resort's negligence is a plot mechanism, the sort of clerical failure that leaves a chairlift running after hours. It is not an indictment of late capitalism, nor a lament for the working stiff relieved mid-shift. A lean, mean exercise in physical dread remains, and it respects its audience enough to simply freeze them. We record the result without complaint.