The Last Winter.

"Mother Earth taking revenge for a localized intrusion is one way to parse this canny conceptual horror film," proposes Nathan Lee, reviewing The Last Winter in the Voice. "Another way to see it is as a fable of speculative evolution: This is what happens when our time on the planet is up; this is, literally, the last winter of humankind."

"It's amazing what you can do with a low budget, an expansive imagination and a smooth-moving camera," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "An heir to the Val Lewton school of elegantly restrained horror, wherein an atmosphere of dread counts far more than a bucket of blood and some slippery entrails, the director Larry Fessenden is among the most thoughtful Americans working on the lower-budget end of this oft-abused and mindlessly corrupted genre."

Updated through 9/21.

"As in Wendigo, The Last Winter eventually, unwisely opts to outright depict the paranormalities that have previously remained hidden from sight," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Any such momentary obviousness, however, is wholly eclipsed by a stunningly poignant, unexpected climactic flashback that silently encapsulates the omnipresent idea of 'home,' as well as by a cheesy yet haunting final note that spreads around blame for our current environmental crises with nihilistic fury."

"The Last Winter was shot in northern Iceland and Alaska, and despite some too-explicit imagery in the final moments, the claustrophobia-to-psychosis continuum is harrowingly fluid," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"There's an ethereal evil akin to J-Horror, a mood that spells disaster without actually spelling it out," notes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.

"Think The Thing meets The 11th Hour and you'll realize that Fessenden may have found the best way to address the global warming issue in a film - by scaring the crap out of us." Aaron Hillis introduces his interview with Fessenden for IFC News.

"The Last Winter is an intriguing film, and one that's easy to admire for its use of old-school character development and a small-scale sense of dread, but it never feels fully realized," writes Bryant Frazer. "It's the rare case where I might actually look forward to a more generously budgeted remake."

"Apart from helming psychological horror movies, Fessenden is an actor (The Brave One, Broken Flowers), producer (Ilya Chaiken's upcoming Liberty Kid), and passionate advocate for sustainable living," writes Damon Smith, introducing his interview for Filmmaker. "In 2006, he launched a Web site dedicated to educating the public about global warming, and has even written a how-to book on carbon-neutral film production."

ST VanAirsdale talks with Fessenden at the Reeler; indieWIRE's got an interview, too.

Updates: "Larry Fessenden is one of the most important figures in New York City cinema today. Period." Pioneer Theater programmer Ray Privett: "Here is a truly generous man of cinema: one who constantly supports visionary filmmakers, in part by making a community of them, and for them." Also, comments from performance artists David Leslie.

"It would be overstating things a bit to say that Fessenden is seriously challenging the rules of horror (there's nothing particularly radical in his narratives), but he does ask his audience to focus on character, environment, and allegory, which make his films somewhat anomalous," writes Michael Koreskey for indieWIRE.

"It's a horror film that sneaks up on you with an effectively unsettling and brooding atmosphere before unleashing an apocalyptic fury," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com. "The idea of an environmental horror film isn't necessarily new, but it is executed here with an admirable precision and economy, not to mention relevance (permafrost that's been frozen for thousands of years is in fact melting in Alaska and Canada at a shocking rate as you read this).... Less a horror film than a creeper, The Last Winter takes a smart and terrifying scenario and plays it out to the logical extreme, with a climax that's all the more disturbing for its minimalism that leaves all too much to the imagination."

"Fessenden is canny about how to handle what could be stock figures - we're set up to think that Ron Perlman's team leader will be the 'bad guy' and James Le Gros's environmentalist the hero, but the script shakes things up unpredictably," notes Robert Cashill. "It's colder than Alaska these days for indie films, but I hope Great World of Sound and The Last Winter survive the deep freeze."

Updates, 9/20: "[Y]ou may find yourself leaving the theater after Fessenden's new film, The Last Winter (which opens this weekend), and staring, as I did, into the horror flick playing itself out on Wilshire Boulevard, with its parade of Range Rovers, Escalades and Armadas locked in traffic purgatory and its lines of buildings powered by carbon-huffing coal plants," writes Judith Lewis in the LA Weekly. "You may look at all this and think: I see dead people. Because if you're thinking clearly, you actually do. 'We're smokers who can't quit while the cancer's spreading,' is how Fesssenden puts it. 'I take it personally.'"

"Fessenden's monsters are poorly represented with lo-res CGI, but that's essentially part of the point," finds Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "The beasts of global warming don't have to look real since, in reality, we still have trouble accepting their existence."

"The Third Act appearance of the heretofore unseen enemy might not infuse the Kubrickian awe intended (apparently, it repeats imagery from Wendigo), but I thought there was a certain majesty to what hoofs it dangerously close to hooey," wrote Movieforum's Robert J Lewis when he caught the film in Toronto last year.

"Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is about to happen, not just to this lonely band of oil-field workers but to all of us," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

"Larry Fessenden is a self-confessed horror filmmaker, and not only perhaps the greatest one working today - his potential rivals being Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho - but also the most pointedly political, emotionally invested, and unguardedly honest," writes Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot. "Unlike his dissembling contemporaries, his films are defiantly about what they are about. Rather than the comfortable 'archetypes' with which so many horror faux-teurs skim across any real investment in their material, Fessenden always has an actual subject, whether it's the self-destruction of addiction in Habit or the familial breakdown of Wendigo, and it's from these subjects that the atmosphere and fright emanate. Fessenden is not making art movies (or political tracts) in horror-film clothing, but employing the genre to break open the dread at the heart of his subjects, to give their terrifying formlessness a transitory form. In The Last Winter, his most ambitious and masterful film thus far, he deliberately pushes the capabilities of cinematic representation to incarnate that unimaginable fear."

Updates, 9/21: "It's billed as an environmental horror story, but The Last Winter bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "It bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality, decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the face of the sublime power of nature. It also accomplishes with a modest budget and a talented cast what bigger, slicker, gorier contemporary horror movies rarely do. It taps into a collective dread compounded by the guilt of our complicity. The scrappy, familiar banality of Fessenden's vision - the base camp is a dump, the crew unglamorous, their mission compromised - only amps up the visceral dread. You know these people wouldn't stand a chance against nature if it decided to fight back against the parasitic virus that's destroying it, and you know you wouldn't, either."

"Larry Fessenden's indie horror oeuvre hasn't always gelled, but it's never been dull," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "He's one of the few directors whose work suggests an equal affection for John Carpenter and John Cassavetes."

"Fessenden should concentrate on what he does well; namely direct actors, and get away from nu-horror music-video stylings," advises Wiley Wiggins.

Posted by dwhudson at September 19, 2007 1:57 AM