A LONG WINTER World Cinema

Award-winning British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (45 YEARS, AFI FEST 2015; ALL OF US STRANGERS, AFI FEST 2023) adapts Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s eponymous novella for this mysterious and beguiling film about grief, desire, queer awakening, self-discovery and the elusive structures that hold a family together. In the vast, snowbound landscape of the Colorado Rockies during the early 1950s, Mike (Fred Hechinger) is a sensitive young man caught between the expectations of his family and community and the dawning recognition of a life he may want to choose for himself. With his brother Tommy (Kit Connor) enlisted in the Army and shipping out to Korea, Mike is left with his stoic father Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and troubled mother Louise (Caitríona Balfe) to ride out the long, frigid winter in their isolated homestead. When Louise vanishes into the night during the first brutal stretch of the season, Mike must navigate an increasingly unstable home, a distant and volatile father and an emerging sense of self that seems out of step with the world around him. Unable to handle the daily toil of keeping a household without help, father and son hire Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), an orphaned local who quickly forms a bond with Mike. As the makeshift family begins a slow reckoning with the possibility that Louise may never return, Haigh eschews the conventions of a mystery in favor of examining the emotional turmoil the disappearance creates, both as a painful dissolution and a strange liberation. For Mike, the absence of his mother coincides with a more private awakening, as his attraction to Jimmy becomes a tender flip side to the repressive forces surrounding him. The Rockies, as photographed by cinematographer André Turpin, are breathtaking, but never merely picturesque, creating a visual counterpoint to characters who seem both imprisoned and surrounded by the possibility of freedom. Haigh uses that contradiction beautifully, crafting a visually stunning meditation on the complicated freedoms that can emerge from loss, and the frightening — and exhilarating — process of self-discovery. –Abbie Algar