Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: Freezer

Freezer | Value for money: $$

• Directed by Mikael Salomon.
• Written by Tom Doganoglu, Shane Weisfeld.
• Starring Dylan McDermott, Yuliya Snigir, Peter Facinelli.

PHIL vs BILL
Dylan McDermott, the star of TV’s Stalker, finds himself held captive by Russian gangsters in this B-grade Canadian thriller about a seemingly innocent man who wakes up bound hand and foot in an industrial freezer. How he wound up in this predicament and plots to extricate himself makes for surprisingly dull escapism. Other movies about people trapped in claustrophobic or desperate circumstances – Buried, 127 Hours, The Call – cranked up the tension with economy and ingenuity but Freezer, despite its twists, is too one-dimensional to generate suspense. — Phil Wakefield.

To misquote Brian Fantana, but for a higher purpose, 68 per cent of the time Freezer works all of the time.

Almost the entire movie is set in a freezer unit of what looks like a restaurant. Dylan McDermott is thrown in there with the door locked behind him.

Periodically a couple of Russian mafia heavies come in, beat him and ask him stuff in Russian while he replies in English that he doesn’t understand what they’re saying.

He says he was going to the bathroom at a restaurant during a date with his girlfriend and got grabbed and thrown in there and he would appreciate less of the beatings. They in turn express their doubts about this by beating him a bit more and then leaving him with the temperature set even lower.

Luckily for the sake of dialogue, their accomplice Yuliya Snigir comes in to add some sexy and some exposition. It seems he is thought to have been a bad boy and stolen $8m from a mob leader.

I shall leave it there, as to say more is to take away from the twists inherent in this.

It does leave a reasonably charismatic McDermott trying to survive in the plunging temperature, wisecrack his way through the tension (and the beatings) and work out ways to escape.

Why does it only work 68 per cent of the time? The ending is not great. And McDermott doesn’t carry this as well as he had to.

Some of that is the director’s fault. Mikael Salomon, former cinematographer for The Abyss, and co-director of Band of Brothers, needed to grab this thing by the scruff of the neck a bit more.

Yuliya Snigir packing some heat.

When you swap your dosh for a cinema experience, if you’re willing to risk trading off fight scenes, romantic bonking and/or interstellar battles for watching a guy in a freezer 98 per cent of the time, it’s only fair if the story is crispy smart, the twists make sense, and the acting is aces.

Freezer just doesn’t deliver at some key points. It is interesting, and it does have its moments. It’s the sort of movie a bunch of ambitious film school graduates with some decent acting mates could pull off with a bit more nuttage.

And while the money is probably tough to come by for these indie sorts of movies, it probably never pays to give a major production credit at the start to The Edmonton Economic Development Corporation. That, to quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, just says: “This has the bacony smell of Canada all over it.”

Specials include a making-of featurette and cast interviews. Interesting note, they actually shot in cold temperature to make it seem more lifelike. Alas, the point of this was lost as none of their breath was visible on screen. Always make your cast smoke for those sorts of scenes. The risks of inhaling known carcinogens should always be outweighed by cinematic verisimilitude.