Your Company
 

The Snowman

✭   Read critic reviews

United Kingdom, United States, Sweden · 2017
Rated R · 1h 59m
Director Tomas Alfredson
Starring Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer
Genre Drama, Crime, Thriller, Horror

Detective Harry Hole investigates the disappearance of a woman whose pink scarf is found wrapped around an ominous looking snowman.

Stream The Snowman

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

25

TheWrap by

The glaring inadequacies of The Snowman are the only things shocking about it. Harry Hole’s film career could not have gotten off to a more inauspicious start.

42

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

40

Screen International by Fionnuala Halligan

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series is comprised of page-turning, airport-blockbuster Scandi crime potboilers; Alfredson scorches the seventh, The Snowman, with such art-house intensity that it eventually melts into an exhausted puddle.

40

Variety by Guy Lodge

There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.

40

Empire by Jonathan Pile

A case of a missed opportunity. It references all the right films, but The Snowman comes off as a pale imitation.

40

Total Film by Matt Maytum

All the signs pointed to a hit chiller: great cast, a director with fantastic form and a celebrated Jo Nesbø novel to draw from. So it’s a huge shame, then, that The Snowman is a bit grey and slushy when it should have been cool and crisp.

40

Time Out London by Phil de Semlyen

In short, the raw materials are there for a fun – if throwback – genre piece of the kind that kept ’90s cinema stocked with stiffs. Alas, the tension dissipates in a tangle of muddled subplots, sluggish pacing and some strange decisions from director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The result isn’t a Bone Collector, never mind a Se7en.

40

The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

20

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

The Snowman goes wrong quickly, permanently, and in a spiral, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken.

Users who liked this film also liked