ICE ICE, BABY : Juliet McKoen’s ‘Frozen’ [3/10]

Published on: January 25th, 2006

A depressingly poor example of British independent cinema, Frozen is a messy, wildly pretentious drama/chiller in which poor Shirley Henderson once again displays her knack for ending up in the ropiest of productions (cf Once Upon a Time in the Midlands; Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself, etc). She plays Kath, a Fleetwood fishery-worker obsessed by the disappearance of her sister two years before. She has weekly counselling sessions with a sympathetic vicar (Roshan Seth), but can't help poring over CCTV footage of the sister's "final" moments (shades of John Turturro in Fear X). 

Kath visits the scene of the disappearance (a cobbled back-street near the docks) and finds that, if she stands in a certain spot not covered by the CCTV cameras, she enters a kind of trance/fugue state. During such 'spells' she finds herself on a windswept stretch of beach where her sister is visible in the distance, taking a ferry ride to a place which the vicar/counsellor deduces is a kind of 'afterworld.' But are these visions leading Kath to the truth – or into greater danger?

By the time we find the answer to this question we're long since given up caring. Feature debutant McKoen writes and directs, and has a long way to go in both departments: her convoluted script rings tinnily false at every stage, and generally gives off the atmosphere of having been rewritten into oblivion. It defeats even actors of Henderson and Seth's calibre as they struggle to breathe life into the stagey, mannered dialogue - and while Henderson is, as always, watchable, her character speaks in such a quiet "ickle girl" voice that she ends up far from "listenable".

Cinematographer Philip Robinson does come up with some striking external vistas of Morecambe Bay – all sand, sky and distant sea – but McKoen's direction is off-puttingly gimmicky and trick-laden: she can't resist interpolating shots of frozen water, undersea bubbles, mysterious blurs, etc. Rather than being transported into a dream-like limbo, such effects leave the viewer (ahem) cold – slowing the action down so that if feels more like two-hours-plus than 90 minutes. A late-in-the-day detour into whodunnit territory is, meanwhile, clumsily handled: one of the characters experiences a mystical "inspiration" that feels especially desperate and guffaw-worthy.  The overall impact is 'dream-like' – but not in a good way…

Neil Young
26th January, 2005

FROZEN : [3/10] : UK 2005 : Juliet McKOEN : 90 mins (BBFC timing)
seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 23rd/24th January 2006
(with thanks and apologies to Bernice Saltzer)