Cold Road: Terrific Far North Thriller Updates (and Honours) Spielberg’s Duel

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

It’s been more than 50 years now since a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg made one of the best TV movies ever with Duel, a short, taut thriller best described as truck bites man. (Or, given the name of the character played by Dennis Weaver, truck bites Mann.)

It has spawned its share of imitators over the years, including Kurt Russell in Breakdown (1997), Paul Walker in Joy Ride (2001) and Anna Hutchison in Wrecker (2015). Cold Road is thus merely the latest retooling of a venerable classic chassis, but it’s a good one, in part due to the choices made by its writer-director, Kelvin Redvers.

First, as the title suggests, the location is no longer the rural California that was Spielberg’s stomping grounds but, as the opening credits explain: “The Far North, Canada.” Redvers hails from Hay River, NWT, and the film was made in and around the small northern town. Between the ice and the freezing temperatures, the environment is as much a character (and a danger) as any madman driving a semi.

Second, the main character is not a travelling salesman but a young First Nations woman on her way to visit her dying mother. The decision to put this character alone on the road opens up all manner of possibilities, most of them frightening.

There are sidelong looks when she arrives in a diner, bleeding from a mishap in the car. There’s the cop whose first response is to put his hand on his taser and ask if she’s been drinking. There’s even a suggestion that the antagonist may be someone who preys exclusively on Indigenous women.

The plot, for those who don’t know Duel, is as straight and narrow as a Saskatchewan highway. Tracy (Roseanne Supernault) is on her way north, a multi-hour drive that necessitates a gasoline top-up at the last filling station in forever, coffee not long after that, and then a 300-kilometre trek along snowy highways and over a frozen lake to the (fictional) Stony Narrows First Nation.

There’s danger enough in such a trek, but Tracy finds herself alternately pursued and then blocked by a tractor-trailer, its vicious driver never seen except for the odd glimpse of boots, gloves, or checkered shirt.

She tries to lose him by speeding away, then by just pulling over and letting him get far ahead of her, but he keeps coming back. As it becomes more apparent that he’s not giving up the chase, Tracy’s timid demeanour gradually hardens into something more aggressive. Audiences will no doubt find themselves cheering her transformation from victim to vigilante.

Tracy isn’t entirely alone — in her car’s passenger seat is Pretzel, a border collie/whatever mix played by Karibou, a rescue dog belonging to the director’s sister. A real scene-stealing mutt, Karibou produces such unusual sounds that I half-expected him to start talking like Scooby-Doo.

This brings me to my biggest complaint about Cold Road: the dialogue. There’s too much of it. Tracy chatters to Pretzel, to her sister and her husband (until the cellphone reception ends) and endlessly to herself.

It’s as if the film doesn’t trust us to embrace the silence, but it needn’t worry. The story, the setting, the character, the actress playing her, and even the dog are all more than capable of carrying the emotional weight of events without having Tracy describe everything she’s feeling. I would relish an edit of this movie that took out 70 per cent of its protagonist’s speech, and just focused on her face and body language. It would work, I’m certain.

But as complaints go, that one’s pretty mild. Cold Road is still an excellently paced thriller, and yet another addition to a rapidly growing canon of exciting, Indigenous genre filmmaking. See Blood Quantum, Night Raiders, Slash/Back, Edge of the Knife and more.

Some take their inspiration from traditional stories, some from newer tales, and some freely mix the two. Cold Road clearly owes a great debt to Spielberg, but it pays it off nicely, with interest.

Cold Road. Directed by Kelvin Redvers. Starring Roseanne Supernault. Opens January 26 in Hay River and Yellowknife, NWT; Iqaluit, Nunavut; Red Deer and Lethbridge, Alberta; and February 2 in Lloydminster, Peace River and Saint Paul, Alberta; Meadow Lake, North Battleford and Cold River, Sask. Available elsewhere on demand March 5.