Dead of Winter: a ‘kick-ass’ hostage thriller

Emma Thompson as Barb

(Image credit: Vertigo)

published 2 October 2025

“Dead of Winter” is “a sturdy action thriller with a twist”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. The curveball in question comes courtesy of Emma Thompson, a much-loved actress but not one you’d normally expect to see in “a movie that leaves your ears ringing with gunshots” and which invites comparison to the Coen brothers’ “Fargo”. She plays Barb, a kindly widow who has set out to a frozen lake in Minnesota to scatter her late husband’s ashes. Barb gets lost on snowy back roads, however, and finds herself at an isolated cabin where, it turns out, a teenage girl is being held hostage.

Realising that she is the girl’s only hope, Barb determines to rescue her, but this is far from simple, said Jessica Kiang in Variety. There’s no phone signal in this desolate spot, her car has broken down and she must do battle with the girl’s “deranged” kidnappers: a scary bearded man (Marc Menchaca) and his equally scary, Fentanyl-lollipop-sucking wife (Judy Greer). Barb, however, proves pretty tough and shifts into “kick-ass” mode, brandishing a gun, dodging bullets and using a hook from the fishing box in the back of her car to stitch up her own wound. It’s twisty and entertaining, but by the time the film’s improbable climax rolls around, the “narrative ice” has worn “so thin that it cracks under the weight of a moment’s thought”.

Yes, it is often “preposterous”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But Thompson plays Barb with folksy charm (and a Minnesota accent), while effortlessly communicating the character’s “fear, pain, grief and absolute resolve”. It’s “well made, tense, fun”; and if ever you’ve “longed to see an ordinary, sixtysomething-year-old woman brandish a gun or put a claw hammer through someone’s foot, you will not be disappointed”.