Stanislav Kapralov

(On Cable TV, March 2022) I should know better, but I’m still amazed at the way some movies go out of their way to make themselves unlikable. Writer-director Stanislav Kapralov’s Let It Snow, for instance, will drag the audience through 86 minutes of boredom, cold cinematography, bland protagonists, stock horror and for what? Kill the characters, have the villains walk away unbothered, and skip the part where the ending is meaningful. (Except the mid-credit scene where wow, the protagonist is still alive but it really doesn’t matter at all because wow, who cares?)  The paper-thin plot has two English snowboarders arrive at a mountain where the ghost of a little dead girl is said to kill unsuspecting tourists… unless it’s something else. There’s a cheap shot here to be had about the film’s Slavic origins and setting—as in: if you really want to experience the bleakness of life, ask a Slav. Let it Snow certainly delivers, with is snow-covered mountain settings, ominous characters acting mysteriously about deathly matters, poor English-speaking characters heading into a foreign country that wants them dead… as well as an ending that spares no one, especially not the protagonist that the viewers have spent the last minutes trying to care about. The film’s flirting with the supernatural is about as underwhelming as everything else, so little does anything matter. Life is cold, life is cruel, life is bleak and then you die and if you didn’t already know that, then maybe Let it Snow is for you.