A Frontmezzjunkies TIFF Film Review: Andrew Haigh’s slow-burning drama follows a young man confronting grief, desire, and the complicated pull of home.
By Ross
The vista that opens “A Long Winter” is sublime, deep, and rugged as Mikey walks toward the top of the mountain, carrying a weight in his gaze that we can somehow see from far away. The enormity of the environment and the heaviness that hangs in the air are evident and almost overpowering. We feel his isolation, but maybe we don’t understand his connection to the terrain that surrounds him. It might be a big city boy projection, but soon after, the family sits down for one of the quietest dinners imaginable. It’s a tight, wounded moment that registers layers upon layers of what this family is coping with. But there is something there that stays hidden for a long while after.
As the two brothers engage before turning out the light in their bedroom, the younger brother Tommy, portrayed beautifully and almost unrecognizably by Kit Connor of “Heartstopper” fame, asks the recently returned, older brother, “What did you miss?” And here is where my mistaken projection steps in. Mikey, we are somewhat surprised to hear, is glad to be back home after exploring the world and getting a glimpse of what it has to offer him. Still, there is something in his eyes that suggests a need he cannot quite grasp. And it is in that heaviness that Andrew Haigh’s moody 1950s drama settles into that vast sky. There is a deep uncertainty inside Mikey, and with extraordinary patience, we begin to get a glimpse of what exists inside this young man, back home on a remote Colorado mountain where love, loneliness, grief and desire exist in the same small space.
Adapted by Haigh and Colm Tóibín from Tóibín’s 2006 short story, “A Long Winter” follows Mikey as his world alters unexpectedly after his mother Louise is lost to the first brutal blizzard of the season. Caitríona Balfe gives Louise an extraordinary presence, even as an absent figure whose disappearance becomes the centre of everything that follows. We see a woman who has quietly indulged in her secrets, a woman whose husband knows her deeply while also understanding the loneliness and despair surrounding the life she has been living. There is intense love in this family, but there is also the ache of a life that has not unfolded in the way Louise wanted. Mikey and his brother share this ache, although the ways they carry it are not immediately apparent. But before the snow arrives, dancing and alcohol briefly fill the house with the feeling that everything might be all right. “Things are moving in the world,” we are told, and for a moment the music makes that mountain-top existence feel almost cosy and content. Then the spirits are poured away as winter approaches, and Louise is left looking out the window at that same view but with a much more complicated understanding of what waits ahead.
After Louise disappears, Lester and Mikey are left on that mountaintop under the weight of tremendous guilt and anger. They must deal with the quiet, destructive pang of grief and the practical demands of survival. Ebon Moss-Bachrach delivers a tense and beautifully controlled performance as Lester, a man whose emotions are rarely expressed directly but seem to exist in every movement and pause. The relationship between Lester and Mikey is one of the film’s great strengths, particularly in the way father and son speak to one another. Their conversations feel deeply lived in, revealing affection, frustration, dependence, hostility, and a bond that neither quite knows its name. Fred Hechinger delivers a quietly extraordinary lead performance, bringing a fragile sensitivity to Mikey. The film allows us to watch a young man begin to understand himself while the world around him is being buried under snow, silence, and his own set of secrets. Yet there is a strength in Mikey, and an endurance that can climb cliffs and traverse snow-filled valleys. He wants to be there on that remote mountain, protected from the larger world, yet his fantasies and sexual impulses are never far away. His attraction to men quietly becomes part of the story, particularly in his fascination with the young policeman played handsomely by Anthony Timpano. And even though we may expect that dimension of Mikey’s story to become more prominent, it doesn’t overwhelm the film’s larger examination of loneliness, grief, and a family trying to understand what has happened to them.
Connor is wonderfully grounded as Tommy, the younger brother preparing to leave the mountain and discover the world that Mikey has already experienced. Connor gives Tommy a youthful energy that sits naturally within the family dynamic, and his presence helps sharpen Mikey’s own complicated relationship with the outside world. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai is exceptional as the young helper Lester brings in from town to take on some of the chores usually handled by Louise. There is something quietly affecting in the way this new presence enters the boys’ bedroom and begins to occupy a space that had belonged to Mikey’s brother, creating a different connection for them both at a time when Mikey’s world has become increasingly isolated. Martin Freeman also appears as Louise’s brother, bringing a wonderfully nuanced layer to the family and to the complicated history surrounding her disappearance.
The arrival of winter gives Haigh an extraordinary physical language for everything happening inside this family. When the snow comes, it really comes, blanketing the mountain in a crisp white glow that is breathtaking and deadly when it is not respected. Set in the Colorado Rockies but filmed in Alberta, Canada, André Turpin’s cinematography, shot on 35mm film, captures the depth and rugged beauty of the landscape while maintaining the sense that these characters are surrounded by something far beyond their control. The town, with its closed storefronts and cinema, carries a different kind of loneliness, with its ruddy light providing a small human warmth against the cold outside. Inside the cabin, Emmanuel Fréchette’s production design, shaped with art direction from Amanda Nicholson, creates an authenticity that makes every bedroom, table, and corner feel inhabited, while Carol Case’s costumes quietly root these people in the period and their circumstances. Paul Haslinger’s score works within the same restrained physical world, allowing the music to support the landscape and the silences rather than overwhelm them. The loneliness and discontent seem to hang in the air, particularly when the family gathers together, and there is so much they cannot say.
Haigh’s greatest strength here may be his restraint. There isn’t the immediate, devastating emotional wallop of Haigh’s previous film, “All of Us Strangers“. “A Long Winter” works as a slow-burn meditation on loss, family friction, and self-discovery. He allows long pauses, environmental sounds, and small gestures to carry scenes that could easily have been pushed toward larger dramatic explosions. The film sits quietly with grief while also exploring Mikey’s emerging sexuality, his fantasies, and his understanding of what he wants from the world beyond the mountain. Each of these things becomes part of the same uncertain awakening, as Mikey tries to understand himself while the world around him becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. Desire never feels like an isolated plot device. It exists alongside everything else, alongside the family’s secrets, the mother’s disappearance, the father’s grief, and the uncertainty of what adulthood will bring. “A Long Winter” occasionally teeters on the edge of being too emotionally distant or slow, holding the audience at arm’s length, yet Haigh manages to hold onto our hearts carefully enough that the distance becomes part of the experience. We are asked to sit with these people, to listen to their silences, and to watch the landscape close in around them.
What makes the film so affecting is the way Mikey’s journey remains tied to that enormous mountain world. He is a young man who has seen something beyond the horizon and still finds himself drawn back to the place he calls home. He wants the security and safety of the mountain while trying to understand desires that cannot remain buried in the snow forever. Lester is trying to survive the disappearance of the woman he loved as Louise’s absence fills every room even when nobody speaks her name. The snow keeps falling, the world outside keeps revolving, and Mikey is left standing somewhere between the life he knows and the life he is beginning to imagine. Haigh gives that emotional uncertainty room to breathe, and by the time the winter has finally begun to thaw around the family, the mountain no longer feels like simply a setting. It has become the place where Mikey must finally look at himself and begin to understand the person waiting beneath all that silence.
