A Fire in The Cold Season: Canuck Noir Offers Artful Take on Crime Thriller Genre
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
Justin Oakey’s feature, the Newfoundland noir A Fire in the Cold Season, is set in a working-class sawmill town of pickup trucks and bars where men of few words have unshaven chins, thick dark jackets, and watch caps. Filling in the dialogue gaps are artful shots of misty forest vistas and many long-night drives, accompanied by an insistent musical score.
If the film takes the “landscape as character” conceit to excess, there are also some strong performances, especially from its two leads. Stephen Oates (TV’s Frontier) as Scott, a socially awkward fur trapper who finds a body in a gully in the woods. After reporting it to the police, and consumed by an odd sense of responsibility, Scott decides to visit the home of the dead man.
Michaela Kurimsky (breakout co-star of Jasmin Mozaffari’s Firecrackers) plays Mona, a pregnant young woman with long red hair and a flinty temper. She has reason to be angry. Her partner was the dead man in the woods and dangerous people are sniffing around to recover money he owed them.
Scott is emotionally troubled by finding the corpse (scene of empty whiskey bottle) and decides to drive to Keith’s house to look around when he meets Mona. He pretends he had an acquaintanceship with Keith and offers a weak explanation for his visit: “My cousin has that big scrap yard off Union,” as if he’s making a sales call.
The Newfoundland dialect adds a refreshing tone to familiar genre elements and the dialogue, while sparse, is flavourful. After meeting Mona, Scott meets up with his cousin Liam (Daryl Hopkins) at a diner, to gather family mail. The cousin tells him that Keith was mixed up with bad “foolishness.” Scott tells him how he went to the house and met the dead man’s missus. “Ye best not be fucked up with all that.”
But of course, he can’t do what is best not do. The tongue-tied Galahad has a sudden need to protect Mona and her unborn child. Although Mona initially warns him away (“I’m not your problem”) she can’t resist a chance of deliverance from the town before she delivers. Somewhere on the mainland, there’s an estranged mother who she calls from time to time, to leave unanswered messages.
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With a relatively small circle of antagonists, we have little sense of where the criminals fit into the community economy as a whole. (Or why Scott happens to be driving by on the evening when one of them shows up at Mona’s door). From what we see here, though, loan sharking seems to have taken over cod-fishing as the province’s main business.
The gang members include Cotton (Stephen Lush), a middle-manager criminal who is beholden to bigger players with ponytails and yellow envelopes of cash. Among his staff is the hothead enforcer Coyote (Terry Riley), who’s incessantly threatening homicide (“I’ll put him the ground,” “I’m gonna kill him, I’m gonna gun ‘em down”) without, apparently, his employers considering he might need some time off.
As noted, A Fire in the Cold Season (that’s the season of human cruelty, not the winter sniffles) is an artful take on a crime thriller. The craft level is serious throughout. Cinematographer James Klopko (Sleeping Giant) creates painterly images, with moody daylight and haunting night shots, though the sheer number of night-driving scenes becomes numbing. Similarly, less might have meant more with the emphatic score from Kimmo Helén and Mat McNerney, which employs strings, piano, guitar, as well as screaming metal and the folk song, “Barbara Allen.” The effect is of a film of epic backdrops and music that risks overwhelming the small human story at its centre.
A Fire in the Cold Season. Directed and written by Justin Oakey. Starring Stephen Oates, Michaela Kurimsky, Daryll Hopkins, Stephen Lush, Terry Ryan and Stephen O’Connell. Available on iTunes and on-demand October 2 as well as with select Cineplex Events screenings.