Directed by Brian Kirk and starring Emma Thompson, Dead of Winter is an action/survival thriller released in 2025 to quite positive reviews. It’s set in northern Minnesota, although filmed in Finland and Germany, and the landscape is beautiful: Kirk and cinematographer Christopher Ross really capture the frozen and vast desolateness of the upper Midwest of the US.
The plot of Dead of Winter begins with Barb (Emma Thompson), who is driving up to Lake Hilda in northern Minnesota (in off-and-on blizzard conditions) to scatter the ashes of her dead husband, Karl. Barb runs into a couple (who remain unnamed), who have kidnapped a young woman, Leah (Laurel Marsden) and are holding her captive in the basement of their cabin. Once Barb discovers Leah, she promises to save her – and most of the film concerns her indefatigable efforts, even as she becomes more and more injured, to rescue Leah from the couple. As the plot unfolds, it turns out that the couple aren’t evil . . . exactly. The woman (Judy Greer) is terminally ill with some unspecified liver condition; she works as an emergency nurse and encountered Leah when the latter was admitted after a suicide attempt. Knowing she needs a liver transplant to survive, and having the skills and connections to arrange one off the grid, the woman kidnaps Leah to be her unwilling liver donor, convinced she’s doing no harm as Leah wants to die anyway. (Of course, not surprisingly, when faced with her own prospective murder, Leah decides she wants to live after all.) The woman’s husband (Marc Menchaca) seems deeply opposed to what they’re doing, but feels obliged to help his wife.
Check out the trailer for Dead of Winter:
Dead of Winter is an effective thriller, so for that reason alone it’s worth watching. I have to say, though, that I found myself very much disturbed by something as I was watching, which I only really managed to identify upon thinking about it once the film was over. Dead of Winter is, I think, profoundly anti old people. On the surface, Dead of Winter offers an elderly woman (Emma Thompson) as protagonist, as a veritable action-hero who struggles and fights at the cost of bodily injury that never stops her; she keeps going.
Below the surface, though, all the painful, desperate struggle that Dead of Winter depicts throughout most of its run-time is, in the end, about a young woman’s need to save a young woman (one who had, moreover, tried to take her own life). As Leah’s life becomes the only thing that matters, the lives of the three elderly characters fade into a rather aggressive inconsequentiality. The elderly couple are painted as evil for trying to save their own lives – and, obviously, they are when they’re doing it at the cost of someone else’s life. But there is little effort in the film to portray them as anything other than evil – certainly fully deserving of death.
The (significantly) unnamed couple
The anti-elderly thrust of the film also – much more problematically – encompasses the protagonist, Barb, too. Barb is at Lake Hilda to mourn the death of her husband – and the film is punctuated by scenes of their lives when they were young (they had their first date at the lake). Those scenes are infused with vitality, bathed in warm colors – and thus starkly contrasted with the virtual deathly palette of Barb’s life now. She is, the film implies, in the “dead winter” of her life – as was her husband, who is depicted in one more recent flashback as virtually comatose before his death, literally a shell of the man he once was. Barb’s life now – as we see it in the film – seems completely oriented to the memories of when she and her husband were young, signaled by a key and recurring shot of a photograph of the time they came to Lake Hilda when they were young. Of Barb’s life now, we see nothing; it is swathed in coldness, absence, deathliness. The part of her life that mattered was captured in the photograph and it’s long gone.
Barb as action hero; notably both her truck and the couple’s car are old models, perennially liable not to start
The anti-elderly thrust of the film also manifests in Barb’s motivation for going to any lengths to save Leah: she had a miscarriage early in her marriage (a daughter), and then she and her husband never had a child. This absence is part of the film’s (perhaps unconscious) portrayal of Barb’s life as empty – already dead. Her life never gained the vitality and meaning children would have brought, so she now instantly transfers that to someone else when she gets the chance – to Leah. Her life gains meaning, the film suggests, is saved from its lingering in the “dead of winter,” because she saves Leah. And the cost doesn’t matter – is well-paid, in fact. The ending of the film – what happens, how it unfolds visually – only reinforces this meaning.
None of the above is to say you shouldn’t watch Dead of Winter. It’s a well-made, effectively-acted and beautifully-shot film. And, in fact, what I just wrote suggests it’s also deeply interesting, saying a lot about how we conceive of the elderly, especially elderly women. I would advise, though, that you watch Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as a counterpart: it’s a film that documents an older woman’s quite different relationship to a younger woman, an older woman who refuses to quietly into the “Dead of Winter.”
Related: Check out our podcast on The Substance.
