Cold Road (2024) (Film Review)

Cold Road (2024) A thriller about an indigenous woman and her dog’s terrifying road trip in Canada’s icy Northwestern Territory.

If you don’t like dogs, it’s a bad start, given that he has one of the main roles! I could easily understand someone who would be allergic to all the mouth noises these animals constantly make.

I’m very surprised, almost shocked, but I saw this film somewhere under the genres: Action, Thriller and… Comedy! And yet, when I read the story and saw the film’s cover, I didn’t think there was anything to laugh about. I wonder if sometimes people don’t just watch a random moment in the film and base their classification solely on that? Because there’s a totally absurd scene right in the middle of the film that ends up making you laugh. But it also represents the fact that people don’t believe us if something atrocious or unusual happens to us. It’s difficult to ask for help and to be taken seriously. You end up saying that you’ve had hallucinations and that you must have made a mistake.

Cold Road, an all-Aboriginal thriller. Interesting stuff! Filming took place mainly in Hay River (where director Kelvin Redvers is from), in the Northwest Territories, but some scenes were shot in Calgary and Athabasca, about 145 km north of Edmonton, in Alberta. “I come from a place where it takes forever to get to by car. I think a lot of Canadians know that it can take three hours to get from one city to another,” says Kelvin.In his opinion, modern films often give the impression of being artificially conceived, with computer-generated images that are sometimes a little ridiculous. He wanted his film to get back to basics. So all the outdoor scenes were shot in cold weather, including the stunt sequences and action scenes.

The script deals with themes such as the disappearances and murders of Aboriginal women and girls, as well as the fear of driving alone on a snow-covered motorway at night. You don’t usually see Aboriginal women playing the lead roles on a cinema screen. But things are beginning to change. In general, these people tend to be in independent films. There have probably been a few very good films, but they probably haven’t had worldwide success.

Roseanne Supernault in the lead role of Tracy and Caribou Dog in the role of Pretzel. Roseanne Supernault is known for, among other things, her roles in the TV series Blackstone and the film Maïna, released in 2013. Roseanne has stated that it is “essential that Aboriginal people occupy a variety of roles and positions in the creation of films and television programmes centred on Aboriginal stories.”

Kelvin clearly loves the thrillers of the 70s and 80s and admits to being inspired by the early films of Steven Spielberg and the Coen brothers, such as Duel (which is completely obvious!) and Blood Simple.

So much for some of the details. I thought I wasn’t going to be very nice about this film, because in the end I found it to be full of long-winded scenes and the main character isn’t very likeable, which makes the film hard to follow. But afterwards, I said to myself that with everything she’d been through in her day, anyone would be in a bad mood, even unsympathetic. And what’s more, she’s already had a terrible day before the big problems start!

As for the length of the film, I fully understand why the director wanted to show even more of the fear, the loneliness, the cold, the stress of running out of petrol and so on. He wanted to make his film very realistic. And he made it totally tragic, too, but with a certain poetry that turns drama into melodrama. The truck’s appearances are spectacular and the direction is truly impeccable. It could have been as good as Duel (1971).

Unfortunately, purists be damned, nothing really comes close to matching Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, which I must have seen quite a few times. Think of the number of films that would never have seen the light of day without this seminal film, not only in its genre but also in its style, so unique is it.

If I take this film independently of its inspiration, I could either downgrade it for its length and unrealistic ending (Spoilers: the fact that she got home without a car, in the cold, at night, without having eaten, really slept…), or I could give it a very good score for its nativeness, direction and suspense. I think I’ve decided.

My Rating