NYFF Review: A Long Winter Finds Andrew Haigh Empathetically Capturing a Loss of Innocence

In his second decade of feature filmmaking, Andrew Haigh has stealthily become one of cinema’s most emotionally perceptive voices. His characters never anticipate what’s coming their way, and he uses that element of surprise to test their mettle. Through internal struggle, he interrogates both our frailty and our resilience using richly-textured characters. Along with his thematic preoccupations (queerness, solitude, vulnerability), Haigh’s character studies are reliable in their approach and quality. He has yet to make a bad movie, and A Long Winter maintains the streak. While his adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s short story is sketched more broadly than his previous work, it’s still a reflection of Haigh’s empathy, intelligence, and keen narrative instincts. 

High in the mountains of 1950s Colorado, Mikey (Fred Hechinger) is a timid young man who cares for nothing more than what’s inside the four walls of his family’s rustic home, though he is oblivious to the cracks in its foundation. His humble abode sits alone on the mountainside, dwarfed by the vast and indifferent natural splendor. Mikey and his brother Tommy (Kit Connor) are young men with differing ideas of what they want from life. By lantern, Mikey talks about his time away, dreaming of being home while Tommy shares his desire to escape their tiny existence. Their father Lester (a stone-faced Ebon Moss-Bachrach) arrived years ago to distance himself from the perils of big city life and met Louise (Caitríona Balfe), who had grown up just on the other side of the mountain. Like Tommy, Louise yearns for the modern world, coveting the appliances in the issues of Cosmopolitan she keeps tucked away from Lester like a teenager’s Playboys. 

Mikey’s world starts to crumble after he catches Louise sneaking a drink at the bar, one of the few businesses left in their atrophied town. The rest of his family is already aware of the way she self-medicates to quell her restless soul. Tommy’s ticket out is signing up for the Korean War, but Louise will never make it more than a few miles from where she was born. After Lester discovers and destroys her secret cache of liquor, she sets out into a torrential blizzard to be buried under the same snow she’s always known. After an initial frantic search, the rescue efforts grow less urgent. Lester gruffly accepts the inevitable while Mikey’s youthful spirit refuses to concede. His excursions to find his mother’s body gradually evolve into a different kind of discovery. 

This loss of innocence thrusts him into adulthood; and to that end, Hechinger’s performance is essential. With his shaggy hair and full cheeks, he conveys the innocence and earnestness of Sean Astin in Rudy. He has a face that wants to be told everything will be alright, but no one does because he has yet to learn he’s too old for that now. Like many of Haigh’s protagonists, there’s a fragility you can see right below the surface. As with Charley in Lean on Pete, he is propelled by naive gumption. 

Lester is no source of comfort, making matters worse by expecting Mikey to pick up his mother’s responsibilities and shaming him when his efforts are not up to standard. Moss-Bachrach imbues Lester with warmth at first but successfully pulls the rug when his mourning takes an ugly turn. He picks up the bottle where his wife left off, only without the pesky secrecy. Even before his wife’s disappearance, Lester managed to alienate pretty much everyone around him. Faced with the failures caused by his bitterness and controlling nature, he takes his sorrows out on Mikey and a young man he hired to take care of the housework named Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai).

This is a dark story that Haigh refuses to present as grim. Aside from Louise’s tragic death, her family will have to wait for winter to pass and the snow to melt so they can follow the vultures to her corpse. We also never hear from Tommy again after he’s left for the war. Despite plenty of opportunities to highlight the bleak or somber to be poignant, Haigh instead finds opportunities for enlightenment and empathy to depict Mikey’s growth. (Maybe he got it out of his system with that poor kid in Lean on Pete.) This restraint is what’s most striking about Haigh’s direction.

Mikey’s grieving doesn’t take the path we expect, but nothing feels like it’s missing. It just feels like Haigh’s found a different route. One that makes room for quiet moments of exploration like Mikey’s queer impulses. During a chance meeting, Louise’s brother Frank (Martin Freeman) imparts some wisdom: “It’s hard enough to figure out what’s going on in your own head, let alone someone else’s.” Haigh doesn’t rely on specific beats to change his characters’ emotional trajectory. In reality, our lives don’t typically follow tidy narratives. While there is authenticity in these characters’ experiences, there is something absent in themselves. 

In films like Weekend and 45 Years, characters feel unpredictably detailed; in a word, real. While Mikey and Lester’s respective arcs are unorthodox, they don’t speak or act with the specificity Haigh typically presents. In A Long Winter, characters are more streamlined, losing some of the intricacy that, in other films, makes their thoughts and conversations so enthralling, sometimes bursting from the density within them. Perhaps it’s the period piece of it all, a first for Haigh, that makes it more difficult to summon more granular personal details. Either way, it’s a curious absence but not one that’s detrimental. It’s also very easy to be distracted from this by the sumptuous visuals Haigh captures. 

Though set in Colorado, the production was all shot on location, and on film, in British Columbia. The landscape is key to sympathizing with Lester and Mikey’s perspective as well as Tommy and Louise’s. It’s impressive and beguiling but also cold and empty. It’s an isolation in which you can either find yourself or lose yourself. 

A Long Winter screens at the 64th New York Film Festival and will be released by MUBI.