Wind Chill

A claustrophobic would-be thriller that earns a few points as a character study but fumbles due to misdirection and cheap scare tactics—in addition to not making much sense—filmmaker Gregory Jacobs' Wind Chill stars Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes as a mismatched college couple sharing a car ride for a Christmas trip home, who take an ill-advised shortcut on a remote snow-swept road, only to be sideswiped by an apparently maniacal driver and sent into a drift. As the pair fight to survive the cold and isolation throughout the night, they're accosted by a bevy of ghostly figures—including elderly clerics, a grotesque hooded gargoyle that emits some sort of snake from its mouth, and a malevolent highway patrolman, who appears to be the key to the mysterious events. But could the whole experience be a hallucination, caused by injuries compounded by hypothermia? As is so often the case in stories like this, the fractured narrative veers between reality and illusion so frequently that it's impossible to be certain which is which in the final analysis. Credit to Blunt and Holmes for working hard to make the material convincing, but while Wind Chill is obviously meant to shiver our timbers, in the end, it barely registers on the cinematic thermometer. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Gregory Jacobs and writers Steven Katz and Joseph Gangemi, “A Frozen Set” making-of featurette (20 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a dud horror flick.] (F. Swietek)