Main cast: Victoria Moroles (Em), Anna Grace Barlow (Eden), Johnny Berchtold (River), James Gaisford (Andy), Colton Tran (Kit), Patrick Fabian (River’s Dad), and Jonathan Bennett (Jace)
Director: Colton Tran
I’m supposed to be excited that Snow Falls is Colton Tran’s debut directorial effort, but I confess my first reaction to this is: “Who?” I went and look that person up in IMDB, didn’t see anything there to get excited about, so yeah, still “Who?”.
Is he supposed to be some kind of hot influencer on social media, is that why I’m supposed to be squealing in delight? Yeah, I don’t care about that particular subspecies of human being; good for him for having a directorial credit, but I don’t give a rat’s ass.
After watching this thing, I still don’t give a rat’s ass about this milestone in Mr Tran’s career.
I’m surprised by how fair the cast members are. Not that I care about this thing, it’s just that such a cast is like finding a unicorn in a sea of self-diagnosed mermaids on TikTok. Won’t Mr Tran get cancelled for this?
Then again, if he had been courting followers of a certain demographic—white women of upper middle to upper class with daddy issues and self-entitlement as big as their BMI, love hair colors and nose piercings, switch pronouns and self-diagnosed mental illnesses every other month based on what’s trending at that time—he’d get cancelled eventually for one reason or another by these people, so maybe he thought he’d just go all out with the triggering.
This one is about four friends going to some remote cabin where phone connection is spotty, for the usual fun of being in trouble and cut off from help.
As it always goes, these friends are people that have zero chemistry and little in common that they don’t feel like friends as much as they are “friends” thrown together just to be in a horror film.
There’s River, whose wealthy family owns the cabin, and his personality boils down to him being a friendzone-d nice guy that is into conspiracy theories. His crush, Eden, is still getting over a bad breakup as well as her mother’s death. These are the only two of the lot with what passes for “character”.
Then there are Andy, the influencer that is all about the number of his followers and having a good time, and his girlfriend Em, the self-proclaimed mother hen that is also worried about having all kinds of illnesses. For one-dimensional characters, these two actually break some of the usual stereotypical mold—usually it’s the lady that is the vain social media addict, for example—so it’s a shame that they are clearly marked as filler characters.
Finally, there’s Kit, played by Mr Tran himself. He’s just sort of here and there, maybe making some jokes now and then. This character’s entire personality is “I exist so that the director can also be a cast member!”.
Anyway, they get a video call from Jonathan Bennett reminding them that he was in Mean Girls in a cameo appearance as their fellow “young and hip” friend warning them of an incoming really bad snowstorm.
Well, soon things become really bad, with the power out and heating slowly running out, and… ooh, will some monster attack them now?
No, these four continue to moan and pontificate over their deep soap operatic issues about their feels and issues. Is anything going to happen or should I go watch something else?
Finally, by the midway point of the film, they start hallucinating things, and River mentions that the snow is probably tainted with some virus to create these effects. Ooh, so will the entire population turn into hallucinating zombies and lay siege to these four idiots in their cabin?
No, they continue to do stupid things as well as argue and fight with one another.
Oh my god, what is wrong with these people? They are in a luxurious, huge cabin for only a few days, and they act like they are trapped in a third-world hovel assailed by flesh traffickers. Come to think of it, I’d rather be watching that movie.
No, instead Snow Falls is all about spoiled and whiny kids that act like they are going to die because they experience even a little hardship, and can’t stop overact and whining over things until they make things go FUBAR.
Seriously, they are freezing when they are in a house full of wooden furniture and things, with so many trees outside that they could have cut down with the ax.
Then the so-called med student insists that they must all not fall asleep or else they will die of hypothermia while inside a sturdy house without nary a snowstorm seen outside the windows. Really, did these people run out of money to at least put in some CGI of a terrible snowstorm in this thing?
After all the pile-up of stupidity in this movie, it doesn’t even have the grace to kill off all of these imbeciles.
The only worthy take home message out of this boring mess is that all these useless kids should indeed be round out and thrown into the wilderness, where they would no doubt start a chain reaction that will end up putting them all out of their misery and raising the average global IQ by at least tenfold.
Aside from that, there’s nothing entertaining about this thing and there is nothing scary either aside from some really dumb jump scares.
Sure, you can watch this thing to laugh at how dumb kids today can be, but you will be wasting over an hour to get there and have only a painful throbbing in your head to show for it. Frankly, show some love to yourself—you can do much more interesting things in one hour and 19 minutes.
