There have been countless stories written about the ties that bind and the often tenuous tightrope-walk that is the relationship between father and son.
Rob Connolly’s Edge of Winter picks up the mantle, further testing an already dysfunctional relationship by stranding his boys in the snowy north country.
Younger brother Caleb (Percy Hines White) and brooding teen Brad (new Spider-Man Tom Holland) are dumped with dad while mom heads on a cruise with her new boyfriend, Ted, who is everything Elliot (Joel Kinnaman, onscreen now in Suicide Squad) is not. Employed, for starters.
Things are rocky before their bags are unpacked: the boys make fun of dad’s new digs, and Elliot starts a long list of “don’t tell mom” behaviour. Not long after they arrive, Caleb finds a gun under the bed. Elliot loses his temper, then decides that this is a teachable moment: “Every man should know how to use and safely respect a gun.” The three boys head to an abandoned logging camp some 30 miles from town for target practice and ill-fated male bonding.
“I’m going to make men out of you boys,” Elliot promises. “Ted certainly isn’t going to.”
In between beers, Elliot is keen to pit his boys against each other by praising Caleb but giving Brad a hard time about everything from not being able to shoot and liking school, to being afraid to relieve himself outdoors. “The world’s your toilet,” he says, in both a particularly bleak piece of metaphorical parenting advice and instruction on where to pee.
He tries to make up for his put-downs with a driving lesson, but Brad’s inexperience on the icy roads lands them irretrievably stuck in a snowbank. A piece of information dropped by Caleb in the car makes Elliot reluctant to take the boys back right away anyway. He decides that it makes more sense to try and seek shelter in an old hunters’ cabin than hike out to the highway.
There’s nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose. Unemployed, jealous and emasculated by his wife’s new lover, and now facing separation from his sons, Elliot is a ticking time bomb.
The thin plot frays somewhat with the arrival of two strangers to the cabin and some derring-do by the boys, and things slip into standard action-film fare. The real strength is in Kinnaman’s perfect portrayal — the pitch of his voice, muted facial expressions — of an evidently wounded man who has run out of options.
Connolly’s debut excels when it picks up the nuances of the threatened father-son dynamic, misplaced loyalty and possessiveness, among others. A relentlessly bleak landscape echoes the Baker boys’ chances of a happy ending, while the last scene frame lets us know that nothing will ever be the same.
Edge of Winter opens Friday at Vancity.
