"The Snowman" film review

While this is a blog of book reviews, I feel that it is important to devote some attention to the recent film adaptation of Jo Nesbø's The Snowman. In my review of the novel, I indicated that the promise of the cast of the film was very high. Sadly, however, those expectations don't appear to have been borne out.

The Snowman is, to be entirely honest, a deeply frustrating film. There is no reason why - given the material, the actors and the director - it shouldn't have been one of the best films of the year, and yet it routinely drops the ball when it has the opportunity to do something genuinely spectacular.

My first problem with the film is that it falls into the common trap of letting all the actors use their natural accents, rather than getting them all to sound Norwegian. I suppose in some regard this is because much of the filmgoing public doesn't necessarily know what Norwegian accents sound like, but it actively destroys the realism of the plot. As a result, Michael Fassbender plays Hole with his Irish accent with overtones of something generically Scandinavian (I have a great deal of respect for Fassbender as an actor, and it is gratifying to see that he's at least made an effort here). Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Rakel with a French accent, which is bizarre, and Val Kilmer's Gert Rafto has an American accent, which is a complete waste of time. In Kilmer's defence, Rafto is from Bergen which has a very distinctive accent for most Norwegians, but I doubt that Kilmer's American tones are what they would have expected either.

Secondly, the film dispenses with a number of the subplots in the original novel. The complex motivations of Katrine Bratt, for example, remain almost entirely unexplained and her ultimate fate is radically different to that in the novel - so much so that I'm not sure how the mooted sequel (which I honestly doubt will be made now) would have worked.
Yes, there are certain aspects of Snowman's plot which require the written word, rather than the camera shot, to maintain their tension, but excising nearly 75% of a character (JK Simmons' Arve Støp moves from a key figure to a peripheral distraction) in the name of the visual makes no sense at all.

Thirdly, and most damningly, the film really doesn't know what genre it wants to be in. The novel is a thriller, and a very tense one at that. The marketing for the film presents it as something closer to an urban horror film with a slasher-esque villain. Just as so many Hollywood comedies overplay their hands by having the funniest bits in the trailer, the same is true with this film's jump-scares, for the simple reason that there actually aren't a great many in the original plot (one or two are invented for the screen, but that's another story).

Having eviscerated Nesbø's plot and made a mockery of the setting - much of the film was actually filmed on location, which further makes the accents bizarre - it emerges that Thomas Alfredson really didn't know what to do with what was left as a director.
Alfredson has previously directed the recent version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and can clearly handle complex plots, so the fact that he clearly phoned this one in is baffling. He's on record as complaining about a lack of time to prepare overall, as well as to do all the shooting he wanted to in Norway. While both of these may well be valid points, the fact that he's come out and said as much sounds remarkably unprofessional. A good director should be able to overcome such difficulties, rather than use them as excuses.

Again, the bones (or most of them) of Nesbø's original plot are there, and there's some particularly good acting in parts. Sadly, this doesn't add up to a particularly faithful re-creation of an absolute classic of recent crime fiction. I'm tempted to say that it works on some level, but while I'm glad I saw it, it really doesn't work at all.