Photography by Angela Nacor

Films, winter and the uncanny

Content Warning: references to suicide, suicidal ideation

Contains spoilers for Misery (1990), First Reformed (2018) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020).

When I was seventeen, I wrote a short story called ‘Winter People’. A couple retreats to a cabin in rural Vermont during wintertime and are forced to confront the discontents of their relationship after becoming snowed in. A central motif was a frozen-over lake on which the couple had fond memories of skating together. One of the pivotal moments in the narrative sees the couple going out on to the lake again, attempting to recapture the joy of that memory, before the ice breaks and one of them falls in, necessitating that the other step in to save their life. 

The metaphors were almost self-evident: the relationship was no longer what it once had been; the couple was, quite literally, skating on thin ice. The conditions of the weather—indeed, of the season itself—were commensurate with the iciness the two harboured towards each other. But I liked that story, and thought it was one of the better ones I had written up until that point. It precipitated themes by which almost all my fiction writing since then has been characterised: frigidity, isolation, a retreat into the subjectivity of the self.

The 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one that similarly inverts the traditional modes of self and other, and was the first film I’d actively counted down the days until it was made available on a streaming service. I’d read the novel by Iain Reid from which the film was adapted during the pandemic, a condition with which its cold empty backdrops and general preoccupation with the theme of isolationism seemed eerily comorbid. The film, directed by Charlie Kaufman, is one of the most intriguing examples of book-to-film adaptation I’ve ever borne witness to. Kaufman—who serves as both the screenwriter and director—takes several liberties with his filmic reinterpretation, including an uncanny staging of an Oscars ceremony in a high school gymnasium. This is one of many deviations from the source material that nonetheless makes the film almost as impactful as the novel on which it was based.

The title I’m Thinking of Ending Things is falsely provocative, referring not to suicidal ideation, but to the main character Lucy’s (Jessie Buckley) thoughts about terminating her relationship with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), the parents of whom they are on their way to meet for the first time at the outset of the narrative. 

Iain Reid’s novel takes the implicit anxiety embedded in meeting one’s partner’s parents for the first time and makes an existential monstrosity out of it. From the moment the film starts, a sense of inhospitable disquietude forces itself upon the viewer, made manifest through the bleak wide shots of semi-abandoned service stations and highway shoulders, or through extended scenes of disquieting domestic tension. In both Reid’s novel and Kaufman’s film, what is questioned is not only the extent to which one is ever truly able to know another person, but also the extent to which one is alienated from themselves. 

A film that stages a similar uncanny bastardisation of domestic affairs is Misery (1990), adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name. So too in Misery does the pervasive presence of cold weather prefigure a harrowing domestic experience for the film’s protagonist, famed novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan). In Paul’s case, the prefiguration occurs quite literally, given that it is the snow coverage that causes his car to veer off the road and suffer a near-fatal accident. His being saved by his self-proclaimed ‘number one fan’ Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) sets off a series of performative domestic rituals at her discretion as he is sequestered in her Colorado farmhouse and made to participate in her perverse re-enactment of domestic bliss.

Anyone knowledgeable with the work of Sigmund Freud will undoubtedly be familiar with his essay on the uncanny, a word which refers to that which was once familiar, but has been alienated through a process of repression. Freud notes in the essay that in the original German, ’unheimlich’ is a direct antonym of the word ‘heimlich’, meaning homely or familiar. It would appear, at least according to Misery and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, that there is something endemic to the isolationism and frigidity of winter that fosters such unhomely machinations of domestic life. Indeed, the very title of Misery, taken from the protagonist of Paul Sheldon’s in-universe text, seems to be part and parcel of such a seasonal condition.

But perhaps in no more disturbing a light is the wintriness of a landscape concomitant with such suffering than in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2018). The film follows Reverend Toller of the First Reformed church (Ethan Hawke), who suffers a crisis of faith and spirals into self-annihilation after a man he had attempted to counsel takes his own life. The inhospitable bleakness of the natural world which figures so heavily in the film’s cinematography foregrounds the growing pessimism of the central protagonist. The film serves as an ecocritical indictment of capitalism and greed, and begs its audience to question just how far one ought to put themselves out in order to advocate what they believe in.

I’ve always found there to be something strangely comforting about winter: the stillness of bleak alpine vistas; the trail of footprints left behind in the snow, which then suddenly come to an inexplicable halt. More than any other season, winter is the time at which my fascination with the natural world reaches its peak. Indeed, while such films might be said to foreground the extent to which winter serves as a backdrop for some of the worst machinations of the human condition, as Henry David Thoreau writes, ‘if the race had never lived through a winter what would they think was coming?’