Mister Viewer, You Could Have Saved Yourself. I Gave You All the Clues.

Opening Act: The Snowman

The Snowman resembles a good movie for all of about 10 seconds. That's how long the beautiful shots of the frozen, desolate Norwegian wilderness look firmly establishing the isolation of a house. Once the film enters the house though, it immediately begins to fall apart in a completely dumbfounding manner. To put yourself in the proper headspace for what this movie is you only need to know one thing. It is about a police detective played by Michael Fassbender named Harry Hole tracking a serial killer who makes snowmen at crime scenes. It is not a comedy. This opening scene is a piece of backstory that I'm pretty sure has nothing to do with Mr. Hole (Disclaimer: I have basically no idea what happens in this movie. It's a complete mess and I stopped caring about trying to put the pieces together especially once I realized that about half the pieces were missing because they didn't film the entire script. This is a bad movie.) but exists to establish the world. Take a look for yourself.

This opening scene is just completely inept and does absolutely nothing to push the viewer to watch the rest of the film. It aims to create a mysterious atmosphere but the questions it raises are just befuddling. Why is "Uncle" Jonas making this child recite key dates in Norwegian history? Why is he slapping the mother when the child gets them wrong? Why are there closeups of coffee beans?

Let's back up and try and parse some meaning out of this scene. The landscape establishing shots tell us that this woman lives in this house in the middle of nowhere with her son and "Uncle" Jonas regularly appears on scheduled intervals to deliver supplies in the form of food and (gas?) tanks. Presumably there is no school in the area for the child so Jonas tasks himself with educating the child the best way he can; which is to say he asks for the date Norwegian Parliament reopened after WWII. This education appears to be combined with a punishment system of sorts wherein Jonas beats the mother for her son failing to remember his lessons.

Now that we've established the basics of what is going on the only real issue with this section is the basis of the education. It reminds me of Yorgos Lanthimos' film Dogtooth which features parents similarly giving their children an interesting take on home school. But Lanthimos used his as a sort of social satire. Tomas Alfredson appears to be establishing Jonas as a toxic father figure in a roundabout manner for absolutely no reason. If he wants to show how bad Jonas is he could do what innumerable filmmakers have done in the past: just show him beating the woman for no reason. But no, this is not a film to follow convention. This is a film in which JK Simmons exists around the margins for absolutely no reason with no storyline or arc.

And the coffee beans. The child uses them to make a snowman's face which (potential spoiler alert, again I don't really know what happens in this movie) he later does where he murders all his victims. He comes inside after making his proto-murder snowman to sounds of Jonas and his mother engaged in a form of love making. I say a form because the child bounds up the stairs to look through a window into his mother's room where Jonas is kinda just lying beside the fully clothed mother as the sex sounds stop. This is not the first instance of weird, clothed sex in this movie. Later Alfredsson will soundtrack Inspector Hole doing his thing to the sounds of Sigur Ros (and by his thing, I mean lying on the ground as still as possible while Charlotte Gainsbourg tries to enjoy herself on top of him).

The mother notices her son creepily looking in and tells Jonas that the boy is his and that she will tell his wife and the entire community. An enraged Jonas threatens to leave forever if she does that and then immediately follows through with the threat. He just up and leaves (presumably for ever). The woman is clearly desperately attached to him (I guess because he brings the groceries and fathered her son) so she drags her son to the car and they chase after Jonas.

Now I know this isn't supposed to be a high speed chase scene out of Baby Driver or a Fast and the Furious movie but this chase is the most inert I've ever seen. These cars are practically parked in the tundra. Somehow during this chase across barren nothingness Jonas loses the mother and son combination (it is not shown but I'm going to assume he drove into a snowbank). The mother simply cannot handle losing Jonas and turns her mind completely off. The car begins to drift onto a frozen lake and when it comes to a stop the ice begins to crack. The boy, begin at this point in the story he has a functioning brain unlike his mother, gets out of the vehicle. He begins pleading with his mom but she is just distraught and sinks into the freezing depths leaving her son in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter.

Quick formal aside: I will fully admit that I may be misunderstanding parts of this movie because I didn't give it my full attention but I will defend myself by saying the filmmakers didn't film the whole script for some fucking reason which means there are entire parts of this movie where I was paying full attention that didn't make sense. It is a dumb nonsense movie that may have been improved to being merely a dumb one if the filmmakers did their jobs.

My reaction to all of this happening was one of confusion. And not a good confusion where I couldn't wait to find out what was happening and how this would fit the greater story. This was a bafflement that the filmmaker behind Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would make this. I spent about half the movie assuming the child in this prologue was a young Hole because he is the main character and it doesn't really make sense to have a cold open prologue for anybody other than the main character, especially in a whodunit mystery where the identity of the killer is held until the end. The adult Hole is even the first character we see when the proper film starts so it wasn't until about the 90 minute mark that I realized it probably wasn't him.

The Snowman is an absolute mess of a film. Intended to be the next great serial killer thriller (I'm sure those involved pictured it following in the footsteps of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). It succeeds at literally nothing except a sense of baffled confusion. After viewing this film I have only a vague sense of what this opening scene was trying to accomplish (I believe it is a serial killer backstory) but it doesn't even make sense (why, upon losing his mother does this boy grow up to become a murderer of women). I still have no idea what's the deal with the coffee beans. I could have saved myself the trouble of watching this movie. It gave me all the clues in the first five minutes.