The Last Winter

Although infused with random bursts of style by director Larry Fessenden, The Last Winter‘s effectiveness is ultimately hampered by an egregiously slow build-up and a resolution that’s overly vague and flat-out laughable. The story follows several characters, including Ron Perlman’s Ed Pollack, James Le Gros’ James Hoffman, and Connie Britton’s Abby Sellers, as they attempt to determine whether or not a shadowy corporation should be allowed to drill for oil within a barren Arctic landscape. Fessenden, along with cowriter Robert Leaver, does a nice job of establishing the various rivalries within the group and the paranoia that sets in after inexplicable things start to occur. Having said that, the filmmaker proves unable to offer up a single reason to care about any of this; despite the inclusion of several superb performances, the characters are uniformly uninteresting and it’s consequently impossible to sympathize with their increasingly precarious plight. The baffling conclusion certainly doesn’t do the film any favors, with the end result a piece of work that’s sporadically intriguing but mostly dull.

** out of ****