The Snowman (2017)

The Snowman arrives as a Scandinavian noir assembled from parts that do not quite meet. Michael Fassbender plays Harry Hole, an alcoholic Oslo inspector, with the weary commitment of a man who has read the script and the weather report and decided to press on regardless. Rebecca Ferguson's Katrine Bratt is capable, driven, and furnished with a dead father to avenge. The film never converts her competence into an argument about anything. Women die, mothers are judged, a corrupt businessman runs a high-end prostitution ring, and none of it coheres into a position. This is not a film with an agenda. It is a film with a scheduling problem.

Tomas Alfredson has since explained that ten to fifteen percent of the screenplay went unfilmed, which is the sort of confession that normally stays in the DVD extras. The result plays like a jigsaw with the box lid missing. Characters appear, vanish, and reappear with new significance attached. Val Kilmer's dialogue is dubbed throughout, a production workaround that lends his scenes an unintentional strangeness. Snow falls. Snowmen are built. A killer with unresolved maternal grievances stalks the frozen north. The snow is weather, not a warning. The killer's psychosis is villainy, not a condition inviting our understanding. The corrupt businessman is stock furniture from the noir cupboard, no more an indictment of capital than a locked door is an indictment of carpentry.

The cast is white and European, and the film does not pause to remark on this, which is its own kind of honesty. There is no racial reckoning, no climate sermon, no body-positive subplot, no historical revision, no lecture delivered over the closing credits. What there is, mostly, is a poster that became a meme and a director who has publicly disowned the finished product. The Snowman is not offensive. It is not anything in particular. It simply melts.