Three years after Andrew Haigh‘s All of Us Strangers premiered to accolades at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, the English writer-director is back in Colorado with his latest cinematic yarn, A Long Winter. Based on a short story by Colm Tóibín and starring The White Lotus‘s Fred Hechinger, The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and future X-Man, Kit Connor, the film unfolds during one of the typically harsh winters in the Centennial State, and follows a young man named Mike (Hechinger) whose mother (Outlander‘s Caitríona Balfe) has gone missing in the frozen wilderness.
Early reviews out of Telluride suggest that A Long Winter will definitely have its fans, but may not be quite as well-received as Strangers was. The film is next headed for stops at the Toronto and New York festivals before opening theatrically later this year.
The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, at least, offers the film an unqualified rave in his five-star review. “It is a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women,” he writes, adding: “It is fiercely acted, and wonderfully shot by cinematographer André Turpin.”
“The movie dramatises what might be the unacknowledged, unmentionable side of death and loss: the delirious, almost hallucinatory sense of freedom from normality,” Bradshaw continues. “This is their long winter holiday from the uphill work that they had been accustomed to think was their harsh birthright; yet the thaw, which is also the freeze, must come. It is a fascinating, affecting and enigmatic study in what a later age would call male fragility and male resilience.”
Writing for Little White Lies, Hannah Strong praises Hechinger’s performance, as well as the film’s rugged setting. “The emotional landscape of A Long Winter is painted with the same precision and care as its images; somber shadows glance off the impenetrable ice while simmering tensions never quite boil over into dramatic confrontations,” she writes.
“But matters of the heart lack the security of the natural world,” Strong continues. “While the thaw is inevitable, closure is not, and Haigh threads his tender but melancholy narrative with uncertainties that linger past A Long Winter’s arresting final scene. So much that is beautiful and fragile in our world is destined to be destroyed, after all.”
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich offers a more measured take in his B- review, writing: “There’s little tension in the tug-of-war between Mike’s opposite desires: that spring will come, and that winter will last forever. Haigh is reluctant — practically allergic to — prodding his characters towards personal growth, and Mike’s determination to assert himself so outpaces the filmmaker’s willingness to let him do so that at a certain point it feels like A Long Winter is more of an impediment to his self-becoming than it is a vehicle for it.”
And The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood was largely left unmoved by what he describes as a “middling” movie. “Overall, it’s a fine production, but the movie leaves you wanting,” he writes. “What about this young man’s story is so compelling that it needed to be put to film? What did Haigh aspire to say with this story? When you have to hunt down the production notes to find out why, that’s usually not a good sign. The result almost feels more like a quiet echo of a film you’ve seen before than anything that can stand on its own.”
