Critic Reviews

Director Tomas Alfredson and cinematographer Dion Beebe have given The Snowman a gloriously subdued look.

It’s a serviceable, watchable thriller, with very gruesome images.

It’s “Dragon Tattoo” complicated, without that one writer who could thin the material out, discerning between what is important and what should be treated as subtext, and cast accordingly.

Ultimately, The Snowman is that most frustrating of film types: You can picture the good movie that it might have been; it’s just not the movie that’s up on the screen. For a while, it sinks into your bones. And then it just sinks.

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

The Snowman is completely bereft of either style or emotion.

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series is comprised of page-turning, airport-blockbuster Scandi crime potboilers; Alfredson scorches the seventh, The Snowman, with such art-house intensity that it eventually melts into an exhausted puddle.

A case of a missed opportunity. It references all the right films, but The Snowman comes off as a pale imitation.