The Dead of Winter

The cold is often a conduit for ardent symbolism, whether in the frozen recesses of repressed memories or in the merciless invocation of human hubris against nature, which is why the refreshing literalness at the heart of The Dead of Winter may raise the eyebrows of seasoned cinéastes. A faithful, by-the-books killer thriller set adrift on the frozen Minnesotan expanse, Brian Kirk’s third theatrical feature lacks an element of sophistication that would have propelled the engines of more psychologically attuned accounts of human survival. But such an element, though wanting, is replaced by a more immediate series of stakes centered around personal conviction. When Barb (Emma Thompson), an old widow headed to a vast lake for some ice-fishing, witnesses what appears to be a girl taken hostage, she latches not onto some superhuman affinity with the elements borne by age, but rather onto her innermost principles to save the girl.

Equipped with little more than a rugged pick-up (which, of course, fails upon contact with the first snowy slope) and a placid determination, Barb follows the trail to a cabin where, minutes before, she had stopped for directions. The bearded gentleman (Marc Menchaca) who answered — nodded to — her queries has held the teenage girl (Laurel Marsden) captive in his basement, but his gruff demeanor quickly belies a reluctance to proceed with whatever nefarious plan he’s signed up for. It’s his wife (Judy Greer), instead, who appears to call the shots: sporting a purple windbreaker and sucking chronically on some fentanyl candy, she throws her weight around the dim, cluttered cabin, armed with an increasing animal desperation no one, not least an aging and unarmed geriatric, should in theory be able to derail. When Barb, against all odds, infiltrates the hideout in their absence, the rules of the game are established. Never mind the why; two opposing wills are at war, and at least one, it seems, has to yield.

Yet to term The Dead of Winter a mechanical vehicle for all the tropes of chilly lawlessness would be reductive, because its motives, though simple, are assuredly stated. The villains, prompted solely by self-interest, have nary a sadistic streak, which accords the film’s proceedings an even grimmer tone as Barb, on the other side, embarks on a self-sacrificial quest to right one last wrong. Thompson’s countenance, weathered by her character’s years, bears the light pockmarks of grief; having many decades prior fished with her beloved on the same lake, she returns to scatter his ashes and perhaps contemplate a life well lived. There’s no little schmaltz in Kirk’s cross-cutting between the warmly lit past and the bleak present, but like many of its ilk (think Mads Mikkelsen’s tribulations in Arctic or Liam Neeson’s time-sensitive transportation in The Ice Road), The Dead of Winter banks foremost on sheer, seasoned grit. Its wintry environs may mark the constraints of mortality, but they also embrace death’s inevitability. “We don’t know what’s coming. We never really do,” opines Barb through chattering teeth. “But it don’t matter.” Despite its simplicity, the film effectively illustrates how charisma alone may sometimes be enough to make the ice thaw.. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Le Lac

Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition. Every so often a Swiss film competes, but usually they are set aside in their own national competition. Unlike, say, the French films in the Cannes competition, Swiss films are given pride of place in Locarno based on quality rather than patriotic pride or an imperative to support the local film industry. This is all relevant to mention because the Swiss film in competition this year, Fabrice Aragno’s Le Lac, is an exceptional film in every regard. Essentially a landscape film with just the slightest suggestion of narrative, Le Lac is captivating from start to finish, for almost entirely formal reasons. While watching Le Lac, even if you didn’t know that Aragno was the cinematographer for Godard’s last films, you would absolutely recognize the director’s exquisite use of light, color, and framing. However, unlike the films he made with Godard — Film Socialism and Goodbye to Language chief among them — Le Lac really does, for the most part, say “goodbye” to language. Aside from a few lines of dialogue and a poem with stanzas that appear in the opening, middle, and closing moments, this is a silent film.

In fact, there are extended passages of Le Lac that are completely silent. Sound drops out entirely, all the better to focus our attention on the lines, shapes, and plane Aragno has assembled. As the title makes clear, this is a film primarily about a lake — Lake Geneva to be exact. And while Aragno provides us with the skeletal narrative of a couple (Clotilde Courau and Bernard Stamm) taking part in a sailboat race on the lake, the sailing scenes serve only as a kind of backbeat against which he explores painterly concerns. Much of the film is devoted to different colors of sky, various distinct cloud formations, and the many ways that city lights can impress themselves upon the water. While the race implies narrativity at its most primal — getting from point A to point B before other people doing the same — human presence in the film is less individual and more primordial. The film is above all a tone poem about Lake Geneva and the areas surrounding it, resulting in a film somewhere between the European sensibilities of Godard, Straub, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the purer, more non-narrative environments of Robert Beavers and Peter Hutton.

Aragno’s lack of concern for storytelling is evident in his highly unconventional montage. For instance, at several points in the film, he cuts to dry land, where we see Courau and Stamm lying in the grass in an embrace. Where the aquatic sequences reference the seascapes of Turner, and the night shots of the lakeshore conjure Monet, these flashbacks (or possibly flash-forwards) resemble the art of Andrew Wyeth and the enveloping natural world of Terrence Malick. Apart from the fact that these two people love each other, and are trained to sail, we learn next to nothing about them. Instead, they are extensions of the landscape, their monohull craft an object that cuts shapes across the sky. Using oblique angles and complex framing, Aragno depersonalizes both his actors and the boat, preferring to focus on the stark image of a mast jutting up into the sky, sometimes with Courau hanging from it, other times just the taut ropes of the mast.

Not surprisingly for such a close collaborator of Godard, Aragno uses sound design to enrobe the spectator in the natural elements. While there are occasional appearances of a percussive music track, most of the time we simply hear the blunt force of wind off the lake hitting the microphone, the distortion forming a solid wall of noise. Then, just as we have accustomed ourselves to this relentless, abstract audio, Le Lac cuts the sound altogether, puncturing the non-boat shots with a Brakhage-like silence. Then, gradually, audio returns, but in such a muted manner that you may not recognize its presence at first.

There are specific aspects of Le Lac that rhyme with the images Aragno created for Godard. In particular, the director coaxes dazzling colors from his digital cinematography, icy blues and electric oranges and inky blacks and grays. But one of Le Lac’s most Godardian gestures is Aragno’s frequent close-ups of hands. Stamm and Courau are often shown tightening the sails or removing seaweed from the bottom of the hull, a nod to Godard’s cinematic fascination with manual labor. But we also see one actor’s hand in isolation, with the other actor’s hand reaching out and clasping it. Both work and love entail literal handiwork in Le Lac, subtly suggesting that in a very real sense, they are one and the same. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

In the Land of Arto

Tamara Stepanyan’s film In the Land of Arto begins with a service interruption that functions as a metaphor. Céline (Camille Cottin) is traveling by train to Gyumri, the second largest city in Armenia, to legalize the death of her husband Arto, who died by suicide in France. The train breaks down before entering the city, forcing Celine and everyone else to finish the journey by foot. Untethered from the passenger compartment, the film’s cinematographer, Claire Mathon, follows the procession with her camera. Wild umbels litter the train tracks, suggesting new growth, but so far the outskirts of Gyumri look post-apocalyptic. Aftershocks from the Spitak 1988 earthquake that devastated the region are everywhere. Buildings are dilapidated rather than reconstructed and, unlike Western Europe where the trains are prompt, this one is indefinitely delayed by the film’s reality and symbolically by Armenia’s collective trauma.

Before premiering In the Land of Arto at the 78th Locarno Film Festival, Stepanyan was primarily known for her nonfiction work. Born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1982, she and her family relocated to Lebanon following a series of upheavals, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the energy crisis known as the “dark and cold years” in Armenia, and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1993. A sense of yearning for her homeland permeates Stepanyan’s work. Her latest documentary, My Armenian Phantoms, premiered at the 2025 Berlinale. In it, the director interweaves family videos with largely forgotten works of (Soviet) Armenian cinema, crafting a kind of cinematic séance for her late father, Vigen Stepanyan, a beloved Armenian actor from the 1970s onward.

Stepanyan continues to explore the emotional and historical threads of the Armenian diaspora with In the Land of Arto. In her first work of narrative fiction, she establishes Céline as a cipher for the diasporic gaze. Céline enters Gyumri’s “Regional Archive Center” as a wide-eyed French woman, and learns that there are no records of Arto anywhere. The Center is far from digitized. Instead, it’s operated by a group of local women who maintain an analog archival system. Their work, rooted in paper records, personal memory, and daily routine, reflects both a commitment to preserving their recent histories and the broader infrastructural delays that mark Armenia’s slow progression toward modernization. Mathon emphasizes this idea with slow pans that linger over dusty files and close-ups of handwritten ledgers. Céline is a fish out of water in this environment — Cottin’s vacant, overwhelmed gaze emphasizes that — but she still desperately seeks answers even when there are no easy solutions. She finds a friend in Macha (Christine Hovakmiyan), who unearths Arto’s last known residence in Gyumri.

Unfortunately, his neighborhood no longer exists. As Céline scouts the rubble of former schools, factories, and apartment buildings that were destroyed in the 1988 earthquake, she asks where the graves are for all the lost souls that were affected by the disaster, and her guide Armen (Shant Hovhannisyan) reminds her that many Armenians living in this area don’t have graves — their bodies have remained underneath the rubble. Stepanyan gets a bit heavy-handed here with metaphors, but it’s important that she showcases the disaster as it still stands today because no large-scale recuperation ever happened. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, three years after the earthquake, but before that, aid to Armenia was slow despite rebuilding efforts from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. After independence, Armenia endured severe economic hardship, including an energy crisis, hyperinflation, and a war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. The country was also under blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan, which limited access to building materials and slowed reconstruction efforts dramatically. In many ways, the rubble represents all of Armenia’s recent collective trauma, and stands as a monument to the Armenian people, whether intentional or not.

Céline starts to understand her surroundings after seeing the former disaster site, but Cottin’s performance remains restrained, her detachment seeming more mannered than lived-in, leaving certain emotional beats underdeveloped. Mathon, who is perhaps best known for working with Céline Sciamma on Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman, overcompensates for this with incessant close-ups of Cottin’s face, but Céline is also underwritten by Stepanyan. The character functions more as a narrative device than a fully realized character, and while her physical presence anchors the film, her internal motivations — like her obsessive desire to retrace her husband’s steps — remain out of sight and somewhat spiritless. We are given little access to her interiority beyond her role as a seeker, making the protagonist feel hollow and uninviting.

The opposite problem happens when we meet Arsiné (Zar Amir). She’s working as a local guide and helps Céline navigate Armenia outside of Gyumri. Unlike the protagonist, Arsiné is open and warm, but it’s a tactic that’s as transparent as their so-called bond that develops during bizarre karaoke car sessions. Despite the lack of character development throughout In the Land of Arto, Arsiné’s narrative exhibition provides context for Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan. Information here is heavy-handed, but it’s also two-fold: it helps Céline understand Arto’s homeland, but also shows Arsiné’s devotion to her country. While this aspect of the film is undoubtedly moving, the latter half becomes overcomplicated with Armenian nationalism that includes illegal arms trafficking and a random cameo by Denis Lavant as a shepherd named Rob.

Despite its flaws, In the Land of Arto’s strength lies in its depiction of Armenia’s physical and emotional ruins, and in Stepanyan’s continued engagement with diasporic longing. The film explores the lingering trauma of Armenia’s past, especially the 1988 earthquake, and the complexities of diasporic return, but ultimately it suffers from poor character development and overly complicated second and third acts. Mathon’s cinematography does a lot of heavy lifting in order to fill in emotional gaps through intimate framing, but overall Stepanyan overstuffs her narrative feature with enough themes and geopolitical context to fill a six-part documentary. Her instinct to educate and preserve is admirable, but the result feels didactic and overburdened. — ROBERT STINNER

The Balcony at Limoges

Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the surface. Eugénie (Anne-Lise Heimburger), an auxiliary nurse on indefinite medical leave due to what she describes as “bad neck problems,” finds a woman passed out in her car in a parking lot and rouses her to check on her health. This hungover woman, Gladys (Fabienne Babe), is the disheveled in a way that is at odds with the prim Eugénie, yet after realizing that they went to high school together, Eugénie accepts Gladys’ invitation to accompany her to her part-time job as a cleaner. She learns that Gladys is unhoused, has no stable employment, and has contented herself to live entirely on the fringes of society, filling her time with the fleeting pleasures of dancing and drinking.

Eugénie is clearly drawn to Gladys and decides to help her, apparently for the sake of “sisterhood.” Despite her 12-year-old son Antonio’s (Antonin Battendier) obvious dislike of Gladys, she welcomes her into her home, mends her clothing, attempts to find Gladys more stable employment and integrate her into the social safety net, and repeatedly urges her to join her in volunteering to provide Ukrainian and Afghan refugees with meals. Gladys, an inveterate nihilist, dismisses each of Eugénie’s forced efforts to “help” her, but quickly becomes the solitary Eugénie’s closest friend. Stringently health-conscious and apparently lacking any meaningful social life, Eugénie starts to loosen up around Gladys; despite obviously holding her in judgment, she takes pleasure in going out dancing with her. It’s a tenuous, unequal friendship, but one apparently bearing some degree of goodwill on both sides. Maybe, Reybaud seems to suggest, the two women could learn something from each other.

Maybe not. Reybaud, by slowly escalating the tension between the two women and then by making a sharp tonal and narrative pivot in the third act, reveals their two perspectives to be irreconcilable. Gladys, who is suggested to have a dark past, does not fear death, does not care about contributing to a society she despises, and hangs around Eugénie for personal gain. Eugénie, for her part, is so rigid and repressed that the slightest transgression on Gladys’ part crumbles all of her carefully cultivated beliefs in the good of collective care.

Writer-director Reybaud exhibits a light touch and a sharp understanding of tone, navigating the ever-shifting contours of Eugénie and Gladys’ friendship with subtlety and precision. The women both appear to be easily identified types at first glance — tidy and messy, respectively — but a slew of odd character details reveal them both to be idiosyncratic, fully rounded characters, enhanced by Babe and Heimburger’s dynamic performances. Gladys dances, drinks, and smokes at unpredictable times and places, and turns on a dime from superficially joyful to coldly apathetic. Eugénie, we learn, was the only person on her block to applaud careworkers from her balcony each night during the Covid-19 pandemic, and she believes that voting for centrist candidates means her choice is “never wrong.” Reybaud moves the film along at a brisk clip — it runs barely over an hour — but drops in these key aspects of characterization lightly and without overemphasis, permitting the viewer to get to know Eugénie and Gladys as idiosyncratic individuals, just as these very different women get to know one another. It’s to Reybaud s immense credit that the third act turn he engineers is genuinely shocking and completely re-orients the viewer’s perspective of the characters, yet as it unfurls, it never feels out of alignment with the more modest narrative that came prior. 

The final minutes of the film are so extreme that some may dismiss A Balcony in Limoges as a shallow bait-and-switch, prizing shock value over depth. Yet the film, including in its provocative final scenes, contains complex, knotty layers of characterization and subtle political and philosophical discourse. Reybaud illuminates, through the microcosm of a troubled friendship, how the milquetoast values of centrist political discourse, embodied by Eugénie, can mask a desire for social cohesion that will not tolerate dissent. Gladys, the antisocial pleasure-seeker, lives her life in opposition to this control-seeking society, and while Reybaud is too attuned to human faults and frailties to cast her as righteous, nothing seems so honest in the film as her mockery of emblems of political power like Emmanuel Macron.

In a narrative device Reybaud uses sparingly, but effectively, a philosophy teacher who lives across from Eugénie occasionally interjects to share his observations about her and Gladys, like a resolutely passive counterpart to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. He remarks that Gladys’ essence reminds him of a concept described by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Joy as a power of existence.” Eugénie, detached from her own emotions and devoted to the postures of civil society, proves herself to be unable to resist or to accept Gladys’ disruptive, raging joy. — ROBERT STINNER

Hair, Paper, Water…

Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a subject in director Trúóng Minh Quy’s 2019 docufiction, The Tree House — a quiet elegy arises, where generational rifts inform cultural marginalization and the spectre of colonialism punctures through the endeavors of pedagogy. Learning words one at a time, their spelling displayed as intertitles throughout, each exercise leads us into the oral history of Thi. Hair, Paper, Water… is indeed a compilation of her anecdotes, observations that highlight the radically shifting socioeconomic and cultural continuities accruing in Vietnam across the last few decades. Directors Trúóng and Nicolas Graux, in this, their second collaboration, siphon the subjectivity of their protagonist into a fragmentary, poetic archive of Ruc, an endangered Vietic language spoken by the Ruc people — a sub-ethnic group from which Thi Hau Cao descends, a part of the Vietic-speaking groups in the Quảng Bình province known as Chut — in the Tuyên Hóa district. The film’s title operates dually as a syllabus of verbiage to be spoken aloud and repeated in concise tutorials across the film’s runtime, and also an accentuation of the respective word’s relation to place, invoking distinct textures that prompt many of Thi’s accounts.

One such tale regards her recollection of the years she spent growing, cutting and selling her hair, as to provide resources to her family and residence. At one time in her life, the place she called home was a cave on the fringe of shimmering riverbanks. Trúóng and Graux ensure the relationship between a people and their land is insisted upon, denoting urbanization and its economic philosophies’ encroachment as a seismic sociological shift that fundamentally changed the lives of thousands. This film’s essence organizes around just one effect of this reconstruction: the Ruc language we are being guided through being lessons for Thi’s grandson, a young boy whose fluency is in Vietnamese and whose education is represented to favour English. In this complex of dynamics, Hair, Paper, Water…’s intimate portraiture communicates a vast network of globalization’s homogenizing faculties. Contesting this, however, the film foregrounds Thi Hau Cao’s many herbal recipes; more lessons to share, more knowledge to document and pass down — remedies for postpartum afflictions, respiratory infections (Covid included), indigestion, bloating, and various sprains. What is shared with us, spectators who initially operate as surrogates for Thi’s grandchild prior to his in-film introduction, is an oral tradition with a pedagogy that remains distinguishable and disparate from the forms of education we see her grandson partake in.

Hair, Paper, Water… positions itself to articulate a methodology of historical and cultural teachings that recognize the problem of contemporary colonial hegemonies as a persisting malady that maintains its threat of cultural dissolution. In its playfulness, its cherished proximity, a sensitive and beautiful record is constructed, both rebuking the reification of sociality and bearing witness to its processes. But how ephemeral and inconclusive it all is, when there is in such a structure the demonstration of a tragic undercurrent, which threatens to wipe all this knowledge, history, and custom away. In its discursive diarism, Hair, Paper, Water… upholds a balance, respecting the life and knowledge of Thi Hau Cao — her endeavors to fulfil her matriarchal ambitions and the fullness that brings — all while it also glances into the shadows of a future whose unknown quality looms over the rural landscapes, where economy seeks a unification that further dilutes the communities living outside of municipal centers. As everything rolls along, Trúóng and Graux reflect on what’s been unaccounted for, ruminating on the consequences of such an erasure, simultaneously taking in the richness before them: a complex of experiences, a life built through the land and its most minuscule of details. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND