Frozen

Mining the same rich contrast between the mythic and the mundane as her prize-winning short Mavis and the Mermaid (2000), Juliet McKoen’s Frozen is a resolutely indigenous feature debut. Shot on high-definition video around Lancashire’s desolate Morecambe Bay, the film taps into a wealth of psychogeographic associations, bringing deep resonances to a flawed narrative with a vivid sense of locality.

As Kath Swarbrick, a factory worker tormented by the unsolved disappearance of her sister Annie two years previously, Shirley Henderson (face often hidden anxiously within the fur of her coat hood) strikes an absorbing combination of pluck and fragility. The character’s childlike vulnerability and intensely felt grief make her determined pursuit of the truth engrossing. Henderson’s excellent performance offers an emotional anchor even when the storytelling drifts.

Kath’s frailty is amplified by the elemental expanse of the bay. This site that Kath once thought ‘magical’ (as a child, she believed it was the only place in the country where seawater could freeze) becomes the impassive theatre for her mental disquiet. The responsibility for counselling Kath through her grief for her sister lies with local clergyman Noyen (Roshan Seth); eventually, and in spite of the cleric’s dedication to his disabled wife, the pair become increasingly intimate.

Frequent, almost abstract inserts of water trapped under ice act as an appropriate metaphor for Kath’s chilly, emotional stasis. These shots – filmed via an underwater camera by a diver in Arctic Sweden – work rather better than the scenes showing Kath’s figurative visions. The sequences, for instance, showing a red-coated woman walking ominously and just out of reach across a spit in the bay have the stylised sheen, and much of the portentousness, of glossy commercials.

Frozen’s parochialism is its defining strength: the milieu of fish factories, moored trawlers and seafront cafés is memorably cinematic. It is the outside influences and deference to genre conventions that are the film’s partial undoing. The obvious homage to Don’t Look Now is distracting; no more original is the debt to the psychological horrors of Hideo Nakata in the use of CCTV footage.

England’s gloomy north-west coast offers ripe territory for the supernatural thriller, but the more melodramatic turns of Frozen seem unnecessary adornments to its quieter examination of the corrosive anguish of unexplained loss. The viewer is not always trusted to ponder such themes unprompted: often they are emphasised in Noyen’s sombre voiceover. But, despite some awkwardness in its execution, this is a personal, contemplative film, laden with promise and thick with atmosphere.

This review features in the February 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.