Image Credits: Courtesy of A Long Winter/MUBI
Andrew Haigh is not a filmmaker known for telling happy stories. From the interiority of “Weekend” (2011) to the lonely heartbreak of “All of Us Strangers” (2023), it seems that wherever Haigh goes the vultures are soon to circle. “A Long Winter,” his newest feature which had its East Coast debut at the 64th New York Film Festival, takes this implicit heartache that Haigh has always integrated into explicitly queer storytelling and redefines it as a beautifully complicated path towards freedom. Based on a short story by Irish author Colm Tóibín, in the isolated mountainsides of the frozen Midwest. Haigh weaves a stunning tale of oppressive routine and wonderful destruction that interrogates the structure of the American family and its relationship to the self amidst an ancient, frigid landscape. Assisted in his journey by the cinematographic talents of longtime, Xavier Dolan, collaborator André Turpin, as well as the hauntingly expressive blue eyes of star Fred Hechinger, Haigh allows the battle between change and comfort to gradually unfold in a way that feels more painterly than literary, capturing the frosty weight of truths left unspoken within the American household masterfully.
“A Long Winter” follows a family of four living in the unforgiving Rocky Mountains during the 1950s. Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is the salt-of-the-earth father, a man of few words unless he has something cruel to say. Louise (Caitríona Balfe) is the mother, a formerly wealthy woman from “the other side of the mountain,” who deals with an unhappy marriage and the endless gendered labor expected of a midcentury housewife by drinking. Mike (Fred Hechinger) is their sensitive young adult son, who once left home for greener pastures only to retreat to the safety of the mountain in the face of change. Finally, Tommy (Kit Connor) is the youngest brother, charming and masculine and fleeing towards service in the Korean War to escape a stagnant life at the edge of the world. When Louise goes missing after a mental breakdown, the household begins to crumble beneath her absence, leading to Lester hiring help in the form of a handsome Indigenous boy named Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). As Mike’s days become an endless cycle of braving the mountain in search of his mother and fights at home with his father, he begins to question the pining buried within the people around him who once seemed so content, all as bubbling desires of his own threaten to bring an avalanche of change upon his view of himself and his world.
Fred Hechinger has been a sorely unsung star in Hollywood’s Gen Z sky for too long, so to see Haigh hand him a role that demonstrates the depth and nuance of his character work is satisfying to the extreme. Every quiver of the lip, every pensive stare, even the way his hands move when he touches something he knows he shouldn’t reveal an interiority actors rarely manage to communicate. He doesn’t bring life to Mike so much as fill Mike with the lives of everyone who has ever been caught between what they know and what they want. When paired with the always magnificent Balfe, or the smoldering self-assuredness of Woon-a-Tai, he stirs such an ache inside himself that it spills out over the audience and joins us in his yearning.
The textured performances of his cast allow the complexity of Haigh’s critique of the family unit to shine through. Whether it’s through the strange emotional incest passed between Mike, Tommy and Lester, or through the kindness he grants Louise in her need to claim her freedom no matter the chaos wrought, Haigh’s writing has graduated from the clunky therapy sessions of “All of Us Strangers” to truths that are far more difficult to swallow– but far more honest in their wistful lack of clarity or closure. The shift in setting from the Spanish countryside of Tóibín’s tale to the bitter American West adds a layer of complexity itself to the explorations of familial bonds and the individual calls that pull us from them. Queerness in particular is communicated as it would have been within the film’s own setting: quiet nods, lingering touches, dreams hidden by the blanket of night and a warm hug given when needed most. Love, fulfillment and freedom are all invited in by Haigh with the least amount of fanfare possible, and it grounds an otherwise hallucinatory story of brutal mountain life and the necessary loss of innocence in a respectably mature reality.
Visually, Haigh and Turpin borrow the pastoral language of longing from Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) to create dizzying images that are empty and yet filled to the brim. Colors are brisk and hypnotizing, and Haigh’s signature style of dissolves turn the mountainside into a maze that makes escape as dire to the viewer as it is to his characters. A Western Gothic atmosphere is felt with every floorboard creak and blistering wind, threatening to turn what should be a quiet family drama into a ghost story as Haigh flirts with Mike’s fantasies. The palpable sense of death that pervades life in the wilderness seeps into each frame, but it never comes without a twin sense of rebirth guiding it. It all leads to something gorgeously poetic, a slow slide to breakout you could never place but craved all the same.
“A Long Winter” has a wisdom to it that audiences will have to take or leave, but feels inevitable all the same. What it feels is felt without bells and whistles, and what it has to say about need it says with esoteric clarity. Haigh paints a gelid picture of what life can look like unlived, and what you sacrifice to live it on your terms, that is all encompassing, undefinable and speaks without diluting itself. All he asks in return from his audience is the sensitivity to listen, and the open heart needed to look up at a vulture in the sky circling a familiar place and only see something that can fly away.
Elijah Fischer is a senior majoring in English with minors in Journalism and Film Criticism. He can be contacted at Af997636@wcupa.edu.