Movie Review: ‘Let It Snow’

by | Sep 23, 2020 | Movie Reviews, Movies | 0 comments

Review by Bradley Smith

Let It Snow follows a couple on a snowboarding vacation to a remote European resort. Despite repeated warnings, they foolishly sneak onto a forbidden slope where they find trouble in the form of a masked snowmobile rider who is out for blood. The film starts off well with a genuine horror movie vibe (even referencing other horror movies), but the story goes downhill once they hit the slopes as it devolves into largely a one woman struggle for survival.

The film begins with a quick trip down memory lane. An unseen narrator recalls an incident on the Black Ridge mountain involving his granddaughter being knocked down, unintentionally, and left for dead, intentionally. The man and his granddaughter will factor in more later, sort of, but for now, the film cuts to the main protagonists, Mia and Max.

Mia (Ivanna Sakhno) and Max (Alex Hafner) are a snowboarding couple on a Christmas vacation in Europe. Despite warnings from an exceptionally creepy receptionist, they get a helicopter to take them to a beautiful, yet forbidden, mountain slope. Max is abducted by a masked snowmobile rider, leaving Mia to try to survive the elements and the occasional return of the snowmobile rider, who sometimes seems to want Mia dead and other times seems to want her to suffer; tough to tell based on the snowmobiler’s actions, but Mia manages to escape frequently. And then she wanders through the snow… and yells.

I don’t want to spoil it, but very little happens in the second half of the film (after the first part of “day 1”). Which is sad because of the great start with exceptional character intoxicated, the beautiful scenery, and the hard work of the cast and crew which is discussed in a 22-minute featurette included on the DVD. Eventually, the loose threads are loosely tied up and the killer and their unsurprising motives are revealed after an anticlimactic climax involving a disturbing snowman (it is a Christmas movie after all); stick around for a mid-credits scene to see how well that conclusion holds.

Overall, it is a respectable first outing for director and writer Stanislav Kapralov and I would mildly recommend it for a few good scares, the heart between Mia and Max (which remains after he disappears), and the snow-covered mountains. But be prepared, the film switches gears around the halfway point; first half has a more supernatural horror feel while the second is more survival mystery. There are two languages spoken throughout (English and I don’t know languages, so I cannot identify the other) so be prepared to read a little if you are like me and only speak English (it’s not that much; there is actually more subtitles in the accompanying DVD featurette). Aside from other trailers, the DVD only has one bonus feature, the aforementioned behind the scenes featurette.

Let It Snow arrives on DVD, Digital and On Demand September 22 from Lionsgate.