| Tori (Malia Baker), a teenager dealing with past trauma and mental health issues, is being driven by her mother to her grandfather’s remote cabin. Tori can’t handle school, her mother can’t handle her, so she’s off to live with grandfather in the woods of Manitoba where hopefully she can learn any type of life skill. Grandfather Ben (Roy Dupuis) is a fantastic character. He’s not just a gruff older conservative, he’s also patient and empathetic. The perfect combination of self-sufficient and understanding. | | 2025
Directed by: James McLellan, Alexandre Trudeau
Screenplay by: Alexandre Trudeau, James McLellan
Starring: Malia Baker, Roy Dupuis
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It takes Tori awhile to adjust to her grandfather’s ways. He chops and stacks wood for the fire, she does no physical labour. He takes her snowmobiling across the lake to teach her how to build a shelter and start a fire, and Tori complains that she has zero survival skills. Tori is an odd choice for the lead character of a movie. On one hand, she is useless. But on the other hand, you can see the scars from self-injury and it’s easy to sympathize with her. Understandably the film wants to take somebody from zero survival skills to surviving extreme conditions and villains on her own. A story of accomplishment for our young city girl, but the extremes are too far on both ends. Tori could have started out a bit more useful, and then the physical fights to survive in the end go past believability.
The setting is fantastic. It’s winter on the edge of a frozen lake at the Manitoba-US border, there are a few small islands sticking out of the ice, but no neighbours. On one of their excursions for survival lessons, Tori and Ben find a pair of brothers stranded on the ice. One of the brothers fell in and is on death’s door. Ben takes them in, but the longer they stay in the cabin recovering, the more suspicious Ben grows of the brothers.
I love a film with a simple setting and limited number of characters. There are exactly 5 people in this movie – Ben, Tori, Tori’s mother briefly, and now the two brothers. But an inherent problem with such a set-up is difficulty in explaining situations to audience. There is no opportunity to explain who the brothers are, why they are there or what they want. The audience only needs to know as much as Tori and Ben know which is next to nothing. However, if you have seen other movies set at the vast frozen Manitoba-US border, then you’ll probably have a pretty good guess why they’re there.
The issues with the film all come with the arrival of the brothers. Every turn the story makes is frustrating. We go from what should have been a simple story of learning self-sufficiency to heal past trauma into a story of extreme, almost cartoonish violence. Characters who are dead come back to life just to be killed again. The last act of the movie just does not fit the set-up from the first act.
This is a well-made Canadian independent feature with good actors and great photography and production values, but the direction the story takes is extreme and unappealing.
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