Emma Thompson Goes Minnesota-Nice Rambo in the Frigid 'Dead of Winter'

It took a few days of seeing Dead of Winter bumbling around HBO Max’s top ten before I finally acquiesced to it, but I’m glad I did: It’s a nifty little film where we get to see, of all people, 66-year-old Emma Thompson go full MacGyver against a bad-ass antagonist played by Judy Greer.

Set in the middle of Nowhere, Minnesota, Thompson plays Barb, a widow returning to Lake Hilda to go ice fishing at the spot where she had her first date with her late husband, Karl. Nearby, she encounters a husband and wife who have kidnapped a young girl for nefarious — but not sexual — reasons. They’ve got guns, and basically all that Barb has are the memories of her dead husband, her ice-fishing gear, and a beat-up pick-up truck that promptly gets itself stuck on the frozen lake. Barb improvises her way through the freezing damn cold in an effort to save the young woman.

And that’s basically it. It’s a spare and frigid movie — you can almost feel the frostbite forming. Thompson is terrific in a role like nothing we’ve ever seen from her, while Judy Greer is equally formidable as a Minnesota bumpkin who has basically lost her mind.

It’s a briskly paced, thinking-person’s action flick from director Brian Kirk, working from a script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb that probably contains fewer words than the Gettysburg Address. But who needs dialogue when you’ve got the ingenuity of a desperate woman and a will to live — if not for herself, then for the kidnapped young woman who has a lot of years left ahead of her. Barb is like a Minnesota-nice Rambo with a tackle box and the manners to apologize for cursing even under the most dire circumstances.

It’s an efficiently made thriller that probably cost scale plus $612 for the beater truck and fishing gear. But what else do you need when the frigid temperatures provide all the practical effects and the snowy location supplies the miserably beautiful backdrop? Eight out of ten, would recommend.