SNOW FALLS (2023)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed by Colton Tran.
Written by Luke Genton, Colton Tran, Laura M. Young.
Starring Victoria Moroles, Anna Grace Barlow, Johnny Berchtold, James Gaisford, Colton Tran, Jonathan Bennett, Patrick Fabian
Check out the trailer here!!

A group of kids head out to a cabin in the woods for New Year’s Eve, but find their festivities interrupted by a strong snowstorm that knocks out the power. As the food runs out and the cold creeps in, the group struggle to survive physically and mentally.

SNOW FALLS is basically THE DYATALOV PASS INCIDENT indoors, which isn’t a terrible idea as it runs the gamut of things that can go wrong with the human body when it faces extreme cold. Thankfully, one of the kids is a med student, so she is there to provide the symptoms of hypothermia and other cold condition reactions the human body has such as hallucinations and the feeling that the body is getting hotter when it really is getting colder, causing the shedding of clothing. While the film doesn’t really have a curse or virus tearing them apart, it goes through the motions that made EVIL DEAD and CABIN FEVER such classics.

While I don’t know how I would react to this situation and how long my mind would hold before it cracked—most likely I would just wrap up in a comforter and repeat “I’m chilly” over and over, SNOW FALLS does make the situation feel realistic while still going into the minds of these unfortunate souls. The film does a decent job of showing some of the more gruesome hallucinations the group experiences like a moving snowman and or a creepy hand coming out of the darkness. While these scenes are few and far between, they are done well and with very rudimentary effects.

The descent into madness angle is always hinged on that transition between everything being ok and things going off the deep end. For the most part, this shift is gradual and believable, but some of the kids go crazy rather quickly and unbelievably. There are some rough and clunky patches in dialog as well, where basically, the med student suggests some symptom might occur and then, sure enough, that exact thing happens a minute or two later, that feels all too convenient. I think that information could have been parsed throughout the story a bit better or maybe joked about at first and then experienced later.

SNOW FALLS has some pacing issues, as it tries to make the shift between sanity and madness too slowly at times and too quickly at others. It’s a tender set of steps to take and while writer/director Colton Tran and his co-writers Luke Genton and Laura M. Young do their best to make things believable, yet keep it interesting without having a tangible monster to tackle. More of a survival movie than a horror film, SNOW FALLS still manages to feel like a slasher film as one by one, the snow wipes out these cabineers in differing ways. SNOW FALLS wraps things up in a quiet, but impactful way that felt somewhat original. Don’t rush to see this one, but it managed to entertain me from beginning to end.