By Joe Bendel. It is an area so cold and remote, even Germans find it depressing. Yet, a mysterious crime boss envisions it as the next winter playground for the rich and beautiful. He is clearly rather cracked—a fact that leads to many complications for the hitman-protagonist of Tomasz Thomson’s Snowman’s Land (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
Being a hired killer was a real grind for Walter, even before he botches a workaday assignment. With his contractor down on him, the slovenly Walter needs to lay low for a while. Out of nowhere, he is offered the seemingly perfect gig, subbing for a colleague somewhere vaguely to the east. Essentially, he is to house sit the mountain villa of a notorious gangster widely thought to be dead. As it happens, old Berger is alive and as erratic as ever.
Walter will have a buddy for this assignment, but the presence of the unstable Micky will prove a mixed blessing at best. When the younger thug accidentally kills Berger’s unfaithful trophy wife Sibylle in a freak accident, Walter’s peaceful retreat becomes anything but. Things will get bloody as Burger and Kazik, his lieutenant with a “third eye,” start demanding answers.
Snowman might be German, but it is stylistically compatible with the recent bumper crop of Scandinavian thrillers, featuring a similar brew of lethal black-and-blue comedy against a Nordic backdrop. Thomson keeps the double-crosses coming at a good clip, without excessively plundering the Tarantino playbook. He and cinematographer Ralf Mendle actually create a pretty creepy vibe, as Walter’s colleagues and tormentors descend into madness. While starting as a gangster movie, Snowman almost evolves into a Carpathian Shining.
Jürgen Riβmann has the appropriate morose hound-dog presence as Walter, the comparative gentle giant of an assassin. However, the film’s real strengths are its villains, played with set-chewing dash by Reiner Schöne and Waléria Kanischtscheff, as Berger and Kazik, respectively. Though not long for the film, Eva-Katrin Hermann’s Sibylle makes a convincingly shrewish femme fatale. Suffering in comparison, Thomas Wodianka comes across somewhat blandly as the immature Micky.
While not redefining any genres, Snowman is quite an entertaining, character-driven one-blasted-thing-after-another thriller. Sort of a chamber gangster piece, Snowman’s Land is recommended for those who appreciate laughs derived from blood and paranoia, when it opens this Friday (9/14) in New York at the Cinema Village.
LFM GRADE: B
Posted on September 10th, 2012 at 12:34pm.