Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Maxime Giroux
Starring: Maika Monroe, Troy Kotsur, Helen Hunt, Allan Hawco
Maika Monroe has a distinctive ability to combine petulance and vulnerability in a single role. It's why so many horror filmmakers have cast her as their lead - she can simultaneously convince us that a character is tough and resourceful yet in danger of shattering like a porcelain doll. Monroe is ideally cast as Ava, the protagonist of In Cold Light, Quebecois director Maxime Giroux's English language debut. The actress is paired well with Troy Kotsur, the deaf performer who won an Oscar for his role in Coda. Winning an Oscar for a breakout role can often prove something of a curse for an actor, but Kotsur is now appearing in roles that you suspect have been written with him specifically in mind.
The contributions of Monroe and Kotsur aside, In Cold Light has little to recommend it. It's an uninspired woman-on-the-run thriller that struggles to generate any thrills from what should be an adrenalised scenario, and it's often confusing in its messy storytelling.
Monroe's Ava is a former drug dealer who has just been released from a two year stint in prison after being caught in a police raid on a crack den. To their credit, Giroux and screenwriter Patrick Whistler avoid the usual cliché of the ex-con who attempts to go straight but is sucked back into a life of crime. Far from changing her life around, Ava wants to make an instant return to the drug dealing business but finds that things have changed in two years. There's a powerful new mob in town, and they have crooked Sheriff Bob (Allan Hawco), and seemingly his entire department, on their side.
When Bob's son executes Ava's twin brother Tom (Jesse Irving), Ava flees the scene but finds herself framed for the killing. Can she clear her name and convince her estranged father Will (Kotsur), a former rodeo star who we assume lost his voice as the result of a professional accident, that she didn't murder his son? And what will she do with Tom's infant daughter Amy, whose existence Will isn't even aware of?
In Cold Light asks us to swallow several details that just don't add up. It's set mostly in a relatively small town and yet we're supposed to believe that Will has no idea that a) his son is a drug dealer and b) that he recently became a grandfather. We're told that Ava wasn't simply some low level street hustler but rather a drug kingpin, but that doesn't square with the high on her own supply version of Ava we see in the film's prologue. The police force on Ava's tail are especially incompetent, as despite Ava repeatedly returning to the most obvious locations, they can't track her down.
Most of the narrative plays out across a single night, but the film's sense of geography proves confusing. Ava moves back and forth between her small town and a nearby city that's a train ride away as though the film's map is as confined as that of a Grand Theft Auto game. Unnecessary flashbacks and flash forwards cause confusion due to the similarities between the actresses cast as Ava's late mother and the adult Amy. A late confrontation between Ava and Helen Hunt's crime family matriarch features a conversation as nonsensical as that between Uma Thurman and David Carradine at the end of Kill Bill.
Where the movie springs to life is in its all too few scenes between Monroe and Kotsur. On release from prison, Ava initially takes a job at her father's stables, and the old man's bullying ways rub her up the wrong way. There is a beautifully realised scene in which Ava and Will have a heated sign language confrontation on a porch lit by a motion sensor, their mutual frustration exacerbated by having to wave their hands in the air every time the light goes off. It's a shame that what at first appears to be a drama about a broken father and daughter reconciling quickly gives way to an unconvincing thriller.
In Cold Light is on UK/ROI VOD from March 2nd.
