Review

Alaska also kills a lot of unwitting people in writer-director Larry Fessenden’s unnerving global-warming ghost picture The Last Winter. Like his Wendigo, the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and angered by human disrespect—the old Indian-graveyard paradigm, as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie. The setting is the satellite office of an oil company—set in the middle of frigid, blinding white blankness. A company geologist (the intensely likable, underused James LeGros) has grave concerns about the melting permafrost, but the boss (Ron Perlman in one of his entertaining blowhard turns) puts profit (and authority) before all—even after members of the team begin dropping dead from some nameless terror and getting their eyes picked out by ravens. There’s something under that permafrost, encased for millions of years, now awake and pissed-off. The Last Winter was shot in northern Iceland and Alaska, and despite some too-explicit imagery in the final moments, the claustrophobia-to-psychosis continuum is harrowingly fluid. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (9/24/07)