The Snowman is the story of an alcoholic cop (Michael Fassbender) investigating a serial killer case. At its core it’s just a rote example of the genre, at times it feels like an episode of a British detective show that doesn’t exist. However there are things that set it apart.
For one it looks very pretty, there are shots in here that make you go “Wow that deserves to be in a better movie.” For another this movie is exceptionally stupid.
You can get a glimpse of that from the title, this killer is snowman themed and is constantly building snowmen of a similar style, usually looking into the house where his victim resides. There’s sort of an explanation scene, in that we do get backstory on the killer, but even then it’s just a thing he does, there’s no reasoning to it other that “it looks cool” or whatever. The style in this movie exists for the audience (or the director’s own ego stroke), not the story. I get that there are people who would find that annoying, but here I just found it hilarious.
There’s one point where a normal snowman is seen, and then the camera swings around to reveal that it’s built on top of one of the killer’s (evil?) snowmen! Oooooohhhh spooky. That’s the kind of movie you’re dealing with here.
The other big thing about this movie that’s bad but that I really like is that there is another character investigating this killer (Rebecca Ferguson), clearly based on the assumption that she is the main character of the movie. So she’s looking into this case assuming it’s tied in with her life… and then it just isn’t. I’m just a sucker for characters who have clearly wandered into the wrong movie.
My big problem with the movie is that most of the best moments are spoiled in the trailer. There just aren’t enough kills and stupid moments to really make this a recommend. Odly enough though the note that’s on all the promotional material for the movie (The “you could have saved her” one) isn’t actually in the movie at all. It was the poster on the marquee and it’s not in the movie, which is just weird.
That being said I did enjoy my time with this bad stupid movie. And to it’s credit(?) it has one of the stupidest endings I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s fucking perfect for this bad stupid movie.
If you want a bad stupid thriller that’s kinda fun for how bad and stupid it is The Snowman is that. It’s not a particularly special instance of that but I certainly enjoyed it more than a bunch of better, but more mediocre movies I’ve seen this year.
Thank You For Your Time.
