Freezer (2013) Directed by Mikael Salomon

These type of movies are hardly original anymore nowadays. It's therefor also really hard to stand out and do anything surprising with the concept. It's the type of movie that's mostly set inside one and the same room (in this case a meat freezer), involving a character who's trapped and is not only trying to figure a way out but also why and how he ended up there in the first place.

Well, well, well, where to begin. There in my opinion is so much wrong with this movie and it actually is doing very little things right. No, the movie really isn't as tight or clever as it seems to believe it is.

Lets start with the thing that bothered and annoyed me most about this movie....OK so, it may sound nitpicky but here we have a movie set inside a meat freezer but yet, for some reason, nothing in this movie ever looks cold. I'm talking about characters who 80% of the time don't even pretend to- and act as if they are cold. No condensation is ever coming out of people's mouths either and absolutely nothing stored in the freezer looks as if it's actually frozen. The whole movie looks like it's taking place inside of a room temperature warehouse instead. I'll bet someone said; 'we'll fix it in post' but they forget all about it, or they just simply ran out of time and money.

It also isn't a very claustrophobic movie, since the freezer appears to be bigger than my own house and the characters do a lot of walking around and are making new discoveries inside of the freezer. I say it's bigger than my house but you in fact never truly gets a sense of the size of the freezer they are trapped inside of, since there are never any wide-shots and the camera is often picking new and different angles, which works pretty disorienting. A surprising and odd thing really, seeing how director Mikael Salomon is a former, Oscar nominated, director of photography himself.

But also the story itself was a pretty faulty one to begin with. None of the plot developments ever work out as anything that interesting and there are besides far too many of them. The movie tries to surprise you with something new every 10 minutes or so. That also means that there is a new 'truth' every other 10 minutes. After a while, you just don't know who to trust and believe anymore. Good guys turn out to be bad guys, bad guys turn out to be good guys. It's annoying really, since the movie does it far too much and really doesn't know when to stop. It besides will most likely cause you to loose interest in the movie. It seemed to me that the movie had a pretty simple and straightforward story at first but the movie makes things needlessly complicated and hard for itself, by throwing in a whole bunch of pointless twists and things that in the long run just don't make any sense in the context of the story. Guess it was all done to fill up the movie and to make sure it would be around 90 minutes long but it more often than not is turning the movie into a repetitive and annoying one, that can get a quite hard and unpleasant to follow and to remain interested in.

And honestly, I have always liked Dylan McDermott as an actor but just never as a leading man. Don't even know why really but it's probably because his style of acting often lets his characters come across as cocky, which is a reason why they never work out as any likable enough ones. And that's a big problem for this movie as well; I just couldn't care for the movie its main character and what ever could and would happen to him.

A movie without any redeeming qualities unfortunately.

4/10

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