seeing it cold

Rating: Null/10 (25 August 1999)

Reading the other comments showed how much seeing this film could be affected by the publicity it has obviously received. The film isn't out yet in England and I saw it in Paris today with only a vague idea of what it was about. What I saw was a pretty grim look at three American kids utterly unprepared for an encounter with evil. The point to make is that the film was not trying to scare me; it was trying to show in a very convincing way what it is like to be scared, cold, hungry and lost. It has always been the rarest thing for a film to show people not coping and falling apart; films don't like to admit that we are not always in control of our lives. Although a completely different kind of film it reminded me of "The Dream Life of Angels" from France last year; the same wintry light and the same barely glimpsed death at the end. Go and see it but leave all of your expectations outside.