Snow Cake

Directed by Marc Evans

Bulging her eyes amid intense bursts of goofiness, Sigourney Weaver makes autism look like the ecstasy binge that wouldn’t die. As Linda, the unlikely mother of a deceased teenager in Snow Cake, Weaver plays against type, but it’s less a bold move than a misguided one. Her character’s fragile confusion runs directly into the powerful feminine presence that the actress perfected in Alien and elsewhere. It’s not all her fault; the role, written by Angela Pell, feels strangely exaggerated and emotionally slight. The collision of these two insufficiencies creates an undistinguished failure of aspirations.

If Weaver brings the movie down, Alan Rickman elevates it. The master thespian seems entirely comfortable as the sad sack Alex Hughes, a lonesome face adrift in mid-life aimlessness. Recently released from prison for mysterious circumstances and hitting the road to nowhere, he picks up a spunky young hitchhiker (Emily Hampshire) whose vibrant creative energy temporarily lifts the mood. In a matter of minutes, all hope plummets after a rogue truck stuns Alex and kills his passenger. Shocked and bereft of direction, he tracks down the dead girl’s mother in search of closure. Director Marc Evans creates an impressive build to this potential confrontation, relying more on basic cutaways to the enigmatic stillness Rickman uses to display exasperation. Then the door opens at the home where his late passenger lived, Weaver appears, and another head-on collision—one of quality and inanity—stunts the established competence.

Without warning, Snow Cake makes an awkward swipe at comedic playfulness. But at the very least, the plotting remains consistent: Alex befriends the excitable woman, whose manifestation of grief gets channeled through her mental condition and emerges as lyrical placidity. It’s not entertaining or touching to watch her rolling around in the snow, eating the stuff, and talking about the experience as some sort of transcendental form of solace. Her daughter told her about orgasms, Linda says, and she can’t imagine that it beats snow consumption. In the last great cutaway, Alex looks stunned as the movie’s shreds of remaining value melt with extremely un-orgasmic resonance.

Weaver’s misguided weirdness brings everything else down around her. Alex forms an empty relationship with the friendly seductress next door (Carrie Anne-Moss) and laments his familial woes in the face of fresh disaster. The movie doesn’t justify their mutual attraction, and Alex’s personal flaws never achieve anything beyond surface inspection. At a certain point, Snow Cakes reaches its climax—and nothing happens. Low-key character studies aren’t required to unload dense plot twists and epic story arcs, but the excruciatingly unfriendly presence of Weaver’s performance makes you wish for some sort of payoff. Begging viewers to shed a tear or two, Snow Cake washes away with the rain.