Three men and two women—Jannicke, Tobias, Ingunn, Eirik and Mikal—drive with a car to a desolate Norwegian mountain for a ski trip. Tobias breaks his leg during skiing, so the others drag him to a nearby abandoned cottage. However, a serial killer is there, and he starts killing them one by one with a pickaxe. At the end, the killer drags them all to a cliff and throws them down, but Jannicke survived and pushed the killer down, who remembers how his parents burried him in snow when he was a kid.
"Halloween" in Norway—Roar Uthaug's film is an attempt to translate the American slasher-horror thriller into Norwegian cinema, and while everything here is conventional, it is still a well made amalgamation of it thanks to a modern style and fast editing. All the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is almost always banal, the storyline seems as if it is on autopilot, the clichees are all there (no signal on mobile phones; a character is attacked, but nobody hears her screams because they are playing too loud music in the other room; false alarms), yet by setting it all in an isolated location of a cottage surrounded by snow, everything is somehow effective and fluently directed. Aesthetic images and camera angles enhance the experience and minimize the flaws, slowly creating suspense, and yet, one somehow feels that more could have been made than this outcome which looks like dictated by committee.
Grade:++
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