Frozen (2010)

Whatever you thought of Open Water (2003), you can't deny that it opened the door to the minimalist survival movie. In the same way that the Saw franchise (2004-) jump started the torture-porn sub-genre, Open Water's legacy is bizarrely impressive considering that no-one really thinks of Open Water these days. Shot for peanuts, the film was the retelling of the true life tale of two divers who were accidentally left in the middle of the ocean during an expedition.

Even stating the plot of the film sounds ridiculous, but Open Water was surprisingly chilling, and today remains the touch-point for this sub-genre. Frozen, very much not to be confused with the Disney behemoth (despite having similar amounts of snow on offer), follows in the footsteps of its predecessors (Buried [2010], Open Water 2: Adrift [2006]) in the sense that it jumps on the original Open Water's premise, and concocts a fictional tale of survival on the bare bones of a plot.

A group of three American friends- couple Dan and Parker, along with Dan's best friend Joe travel to a ski resort to enjoy a day on the slopes. After a day of sporting fun, they persuade the ski lift operator to let them have one last run down the mountain, before the resort closes for the week due to poor incoming weather. Begrudgingly he grants their request, and he is shortly replaced by another operator, informing him that there's three more people to come down before he can shut off the machine.

Unsurprisingly, the operator mistakes three other skiers for our main characters, shutting down the ski lift (and subsequently the resort) leaving Dan, Parker and Joe stranded on a ski lift halfway up a mountain in near complete darkness. What follows is more or less exactly what you'd expect. You feel some sort of vague sympathy when things get really nasty, but at the back of your mind is the classic "well this is entirely your own fault". Admittedly this might suggest that Frozen is sort of succeeding in what it sets out to do, but it suffers from not having the badge of being a true story.

Of course this doesn't mean it should be incapable of provoking some emotion. Neil Marshall's 2005 horror The Descent is a fictional tale of an underground cave expedition that goes horribly wrong, and as well as being extremely claustrophobic it's effectively nasty and keeps you emotionally engaged despite predictably poor decisions from certain characters. The Descent is what Frozen would love to be, but to Frozen's credit it doesn't aim particularly high, and although it's utterly disposable fodder, it's far from being dreadful.

The single setting thriller is something that might seem simple to get right, but this is far from the truth. You need to maintain a tension and keep the audiences gripped within a simple premise, and at certain points Frozen does approach this fusion. I did consistently wonder how and if the three of them were going to get down from the chairlift, I just didn't particularly care if they did or not.

So if you're into your minimalist survival thrillers, Frozen might be worth ninety minutes of your day. But even so you're probably better off rewatching Open Water, or perhaps more pertinently in terms of pure fiction, The Descent. 5.5/10