This odd little Canadian chiller (from Michael Redhill’s pseudonymous Inger Ash Wolfe novel) seems to be the work of someone who has watched and enjoyed both Fargo and Se7en and can’t quite figure out how much of each to borrow from. Susan Sarandon is the hard-drinking cop in snowy Fort Dundas whose investigation of a brutal murder leads to a trail of ritualistically manipulated corpses. The mystery itself is fairly uninteresting, despite Donald Sutherland’s scenery-chewing attempts to conjure an air of ominous ooga-booga, to which ends Christopher Heyerdahl fares rather better. Yet there are pleasures to be found in the crotchety maternal interplay between Sarandon and Ellen Burstyn, the latter of whom seems to be enjoying a very welcome big-screen revival – stealing the show in Kevin Costner’s current release Draft Day, and soon to appear in Christopher Nolan’s eagerly anticipated Interstellar.
