Telling a simple, stripped-back, ghost story can be something of a complex task. Obviously you have to assemble appropriately creepy surroundings to fully drive home the supernatural occurrences, and ensure that the lore that lurks within carries sufficient weight to deliver effective scares that burrow beneath the skin and chill the blood. Well, if chilling the blood is in order, 2007 horror flick, Wind Chill, certainly has the promise to succeed simply by ensuring that events occur in distinctly below zero temperatures, as a winter rideshare takes a sinister detour along a stretch of road with far more dangerous hazards than black ice.
But on top this promising set up, we also find that Wind Chill contains a post-Devil Wears Prada performance from Emily Blunt, support from A History Of Violence’s Aston Holmes and financial aid from the production company owned by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. It’s a shame then, that the final product ultimately left me cold…
At a Pennsylvania university, we find a female student we only know as “girl”, hoping to find a rideshare in order to get her back home to Wilmington, Delaware for the Christmas holidays. She finds it from a corduroy wearing philosophy student known to us as “Guy” who seems to have packed a little too well for the trip. However, when they get underway, the pair discover that not only do they have precious little in common, but their personalities seem tailor made to irritate one another. What’s even more worrying is that after a small spot of questioning, it becomes evident that Guy isn’t actually from Delaware at all and seems to have deliberately taken a route that takes them off the highway and onto a snowy backroad.
However, as suspicious as Guy’s behavior is, even he can’t be blamed when another car suddenly appears coming from the opposite direction which violently runs them off the road. When both Girl and Guy wake after their ordeal has left them both unconscious, they discover that Guy’s crappy old car has been forced into a snowdrift and is well and truly stuck. Stranded on an unused backroad with temperatures dropping alarmingly fast, a hike back to a gas station proves fruitless, but what is more panic-inducing is that both of them start to see strange figures wandering around the area at random intervals.
In fact, it’s kind of tough to determine which of the shambling figures are more alarming. A serious contender is the quartet of priests who watch from the trees, but equally troubling is the bloated man who looks like he’s been underwater for weeks – however, the winner seems to be a corrupt, violent cop who seems trapped out of time and is heralded by the sound of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” playing on the radio. It soon becomes clear that Girl and Guy are trapped on a stretch of road that is infested with ghosts all suffering a traumatic past – but can the stranded couple beat them, or will they end up joining them?
There’s been dark, stripped back, road based ghost stories before – Hell, 2003’s Dead End even takes place at Christmas much like Gregory Jacobs’ snowy, spectral outing dies here – but you’d think with the addition of bone-chilling temperatures and a small, but truly impressive cast, Wind Chill would breeze in with above-average results. However, while it checks off some genuinely positive points, the film simply can’t manage to utilise them in a way that ends up being fairly predictable and actually kind of dull. Understandably playing the slow burn card to start with, a huge bulk of the first half sets up our unnamed characters and the details behind their fateful road trip. But after covering the basics and having the pair find that they’re as compatible as chalk and gasoline, the film is unable to capitalise when it has to shift into the ghost stuff.
While Wind Chill seems to be using The Sixth Sense’s default setting when it comes to its ghosts (they don’t know they’re dead; they’re trapped in the same, repetitive behavioural loops), Jacobs can’t hope to even try to equal M. Night Shyamalan’s classic chiller and instead delivers a string of episodic encounters that proves to neither be particularly scary, or even remotely exciting. However, what is particularly worrisome is that even though the film has an appropriately intimidating backdrop (snowy road at night) and a some fittingly managed dead people, Jacobs can’t seem to get them to engineer the levels of choking dread that such a film needs if it’s going to work. However, working in a story of Martin Donovan’s corrupt, murderous police officer, who continues to kill and terrorise long after he met true justice, simply isn’t explored well enough, leading to a choppily edited and muddled second half.
However, the real surprise is that even with two, very capable leads, it’s virtually impossible to feel any empathy for their ghostly predicament as the script makes them fundamentally unlikeable right from the off. Blunt’s Girl is the type of b-word who loudly talks trash about her driver on the phone while sitting in the passenger seat and who puts her feet on the dashboard to dry the paint on her toenails, while it’s revealed that Holmes’ Guy has completely lied about himself in order to get a girl he likes into his car for a five hour trip before deciding to take an unscheduled detour to pick a route that’s more romantic. As a result, it’s tough to care much about either of them due to the fact that they both alternate between being horribly entitled and genuinely creepy. Obviously, the film is not attempting to pull any punches by making their leads a couple of cookie-cutter love interests, but Holmes’ tone-deaf attempts at romance and Blunt’s famous talent at delivering a withering, weapon-grade death stare just makes them both as appealing as athlete’s foot.
It’s something of a shame, because if Jacobs could have wrangled all the winning aspects of the film together, we could have had a low-key little horror firecracker on our hands. However, once the film attempts to explain how all the ghosts are connected and starts throwing time-skipping reality hiccups, what little atmosphere that’s been built up by the snowy ambience soon melts away entirely. Maybe with someone in charge who knew how to better manipulate on-screen dread, Wind Chill could have beat the competition cold, but as it stands, it simply just blows. If I’m being Blunt…
The ingredients were here for something that could have frozen the blood on a whole bunch of different levels, but not even the presence of Emily Blunt can elevate this sinister snow-fest to anything more than confused slush. While the various ingredients of the film are sound, Jacobs just can’t put them together in a way that’s effective, and instead of Wind Chill, all we get is hot air.
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