Snow Cake

Most movies have characters in them that don't mean anything to me. Everyone is attractive or extraordinary or utterly virtuous, characters meant to play a role or illustrate an archetype. To an extent so are the characters in this movie, they could each be identified by a single word, but this movie is different somehow.

I just erased about 3 paragraphs because I don't want to go and describe the progress of the story if there's even a single person reading this who might end up going to City Cinema this week to see it. I'd be taking away from your experience if you did.

I found the movie much more powerful than most films I've ever seen. There are some people who, when I meet them or hear them speak I am completely unable to know what they are like inside, how their thoughts work, what drives their actions. And there are other people whom I feel like I know very deeply, even if I've only had the briefest of encounters with them. The two main characters in this film would fit into the latter category for me. Yet they're so fundamentally different, one being a middle-aged man trying to move beyond his past and with no one in his life that he's close to, and another an autistic woman who loses her daughter but is more concerned with how she's going to deal with the garbage that needs to be taken out than with the emotions everyone else is going through at the same time.

My empathy circuits were firing on all cylinders but in two directions simultaenously. I felt like I could get inside the heads of both those characters equally, and understand the tension but also the positive value of the characters coming up against each other and learning to accept each other. I really must have a dual nature, it would explain why people confuse me so much but at the same time why I can feel so attached to people somehow.

There's something in the mind of the screenplay writer that I think I could really identify with.

Link: Snow Cake at IMDB.

Labels: City Cinema, Movies, Reviews, Snow Cake