The Last Winter | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Larry Fessenden |
Written by |
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Produced by |
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Starring | |
Music by | Jeff Grace |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | IFC Films |
Release dates |
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Running time | 107 minutes |
Countries | |
Language | English |
Budget | $7 million [2] |
Box office | $97,522 |
The Last Winter is a 2006 horror film directed by Larry Fessenden. The Last Winter premiered in The Contemporary World Cinema Programme at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2006. The script for the film originally featured a more woodsy Alaska with pine trees and it was after a research trip to Prudhoe Bay that they discovered the harsh flat conditions that ultimately ended up in the film. [3] The movie received mostly positive reviews from critics, praised for its tension and character dynamics.
The American oil company K.I.K Corporation is building an ice road to explore the remote northern Arctic National Wildlife Refuge seeking energy independence. Independent environmentalists work together in a drilling base headed by the tough Ed Pollack in a sort of agreement with the government, approving procedures and sending reports of the operation. A friendly football game outside of the housing area is interrupted when environmental scientist Elliot accidentally collides with rookie oil worker Maxwell, resulting in Elliot getting a bloody nose. That night, Maxwell is disturbed by the sighting a spectral herd of Caribou charging past the camp; the eerie sight of the ghostly animals unnerves him. The next day, Maxwell is dispatched to check on one of the sites the drilling team is working on and mysteriously goes missing for most of the day. He stumbles back to camp that night traumatized, just as the others are about to head out into the wastes to look for him, claiming that his radio had been not working - Hoffman checks the radio which states Maxwell walked 300 miles. Maxwell gets into an angry confrontation with environmental scientist James Hoffman, admitting that he didn't want to work on the oil site but his father, a friend of Pollack, thought it would be good for him; Maxwell states that he "saw something" out in the snow and demands that Hoffman, who has repeatedly been raising the alarm about drilling in the area due to the extremely warm (for Alaska) temperature, tells the public.
That night, Maxwell, still partly delirious, strips naked and ventures out with a video camera, intending to document the paranormal phenomena. He captures the spectral herd of Caribou passing on camera before something strikes him from behind. When he is found dead out on the snow the next morning, Hoffman suspects that sour gas (natural gas containing hydrogen sulfide) may have been leaked out as a result of runaway climate change (arctic methane release). The sour gas might then be provoking hallucinations and insanity in the group. Elliot, Hoffman's partner, attempts to email the outside world, but can't get a signal; he then dies shortly thereafter, possibly of a brain aneurysm. Hoffman had refused to sign off on permission for heavy equipment to be brought in to help move drilling equipment due to potential damage to the tundra earlier in the film; Pollack and his boss, Foster, arrange for Hoffman to be replaced as a result. Hoffman convinces Ed to travel with the team to a hospital for examination after Elliot's death; however, the bush plane arriving to pick them up crashes into their building, badly damaging it. Gary, the pilot, and the replacement environmental scientist, Marshowitz, are both killed in the crash; Foster is horrifically burned, but manages to live out the night before dying. Native Alaskan worker Lee vanishes without a trace the next morning; the sound of hooves, the same sound which occurred prior to each appearance of the ghostly caribou, is heard. The only thing left are his boots, still propped up as if someone was standing in them. His fellow Native Alaskan worker, Dawn, goes insane shortly thereafter and murders Motor, the station mechanic, who had been injured when the plane crashed into the building. Abby stumbles upon the scene and, in an altercation with Dawn, pushes her over a shelf, causing Dawn to fall and break her neck.
One of the characters presently opines that nature itself has turned against mankind. Documentation and research found in an abandoned shack in the middle of the Arctic by another team member suggest that the Earth is releasing 'The Last Winter'. This implies that the rapacious, virus-like behavior of oil-seeking humans has resurrected the 'ghosts' of the fossil-fuels being siphoned out of the ground. The chief catalyst here is allegedly the spirit of the Wendigo; Dawn, while treating one of Elliot's nose bleeds, refers to a similar spirit from Algonquin mythology known as the Chenoo. In the penultimate scene, Hoffman must decide whether to fire a flare gun at a ghost stalking Pollack, or up into the air to summon help from a nearby town, opting for the latter. This action causes the creature, a massive, ghostly moose, to focus on Hoffman instead of Pollack, and it grabs him and carries him off. The scene then segues into a montage of past life images which interrupt themselves long enough to reveal Pollack being attacked and presumably killed by a trio of spectral creatures.
The ending scene is that of the only surviving researcher, Abby Sellers, waking up alone in a deserted hospital with no recollection of arriving there. A news anchorman is broadcasting over a television in the waiting room about natural disasters occurring nationwide. She discovers a male employee who has committed suicide by hanging himself in one of the rooms. She proceeds outside, and the camera's perspective switches to a claustrophobic overhead shot that gives away very little of what she is witnessing. There are pools of water on the ground nearby. In the background she hears car alarms and the sound of the wind, as well as a fluttering noise similar to that made by the murderous "ghost" creatures further north in the Alaskan snow fields.
Fessenden's first idea for the script involved a Muslim and a non-Muslim forced to depend on each other in a remote location. This was later mixed with and refined by other ideas that involved the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and global warming. [4] The idea of stranding two people with radically different outlooks was subsequently incorporated into the film's ending. [5] The setting was partially inspired by Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage , a non-fiction book about wilderness survival in the Antarctic. Fessenden brought in co-writer Robert Leaver to collaborate with, and the two went back and forth on various ideas. Fessenden said, "Ultimately I wanted to show how an individual’s worldview affects how he or she deals with reality." [6] When writing the characters, Fessenden gave Pollack ideas and personality traits that he could relate to while keeping the character's outlook reactionary. For Fessenden, this demonstrated a common American outlook that he wanted to highlight as having to change to fit the needs a changing world. Fessenden said the monsters are not to be taken literally and are "a manifestation within Hoffman's mind". [4]
When casting the film, Fessenden looked to recruit Perlman because of his gruff performance as the title character in Hellboy . [4] LeGros and Britton are actors that Fessenden enjoys, and he wanted to give them starring roles. [6] Funding came from the Icelandic Film Commission and Katapult. Shooting took place in both Iceland and Alaska. Iceland was chosen because of the poor film infrastructure in Alaska, and Canada – the other obvious shooting location – was not flat or snowy enough. [4] Fessenden credited shooting some scenes in Alaska with adding authenticity to the film and further inspiring him to make changes to the script as he scouted locations. [6]
The Last Winter premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. [7] The U.S. cable channel IFC had been supportive of Fessenden's career and often played his films. When someone from IFC Films said he liked the film, Fessenden sought out a distribution deal from them. [6] They released it in the US on September 19, 2007, where it grossed $33,190. It grossed another $64,332 internationally, for a worldwide total of $97,522. [8]
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 76% of 50 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 6.7/10. The site's consensus reads: "The Last Winter creatively and effectively uses horror tactics – fear, tension, anticipation, and just enough gore – to shock, but never repulse, its audience." [9] Metacritic rated it 69/100 based on 17 reviews. [10] Dennis Harvey of Variety called it "an imperfect but compelling thriller" that returns to Fessenden's interest in character dynamics, atmosphere, and offbeat narrative ideas rather than genre cliches. [1] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times selected it as a "NYT Critics' Pick" and wrote that it "breathes fresh air into a stale setup", comparing it to the "elegantly restrained horror" of Val Lewton. [11] In describing it as a traditional Gothic horror story, Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it "accomplishes with a modest budget and a talented cast what bigger, slicker, gorier contemporary horror movies rarely do". [12]
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or Arctic Refuge is a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Alaska, United States, on traditional Iñupiaq and Gwich'in lands. The refuge is 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 km2) of the Alaska North Slope region, with a northern coastline and vast inland forest, taiga, and tundra regions. ANWR is the largest national wildlife refuge in the country, slightly larger than the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is administered from offices in Fairbanks. ANWR is home to a diverse range of endemic mammal species; notably, it is one of the few North American locations with all three endemic American bears—the polar bear, grizzly bear, and American black bear, each of which resides predominantly in its own ecological niche. Besides the bears, other mammal species include the moose, caribou, wolves, red and Arctic fox, Canada lynx, wolverine, pine marten, American beaver, and North American river otter. Further inland, mountain goats may be seen near the slope. Hundreds of species of migratory birds visit the refuge yearly, and it is a vital, protected breeding location for them. Snow geese, eiders and snowy owls may be observed as well.
The reindeer or caribou is a species of deer with circumpolar distribution, native to Arctic, subarctic, tundra, boreal, and mountainous regions of Northern Europe, Siberia, and North America. It is the only representative of the genus Rangifer. More recent studies suggest the splitting of reindeer and caribou into six distinct species over their range.
The Inupiat are a group of Alaska Natives whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current communities include 34 villages across Iñupiat Nunaat, including seven Alaskan villages in the North Slope Borough, affiliated with the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; eleven villages in Northwest Arctic Borough; and sixteen villages affiliated with the Bering Straits Regional Corporation. They often claim to be the first people of the Kauwerak.
The Brooks Range is a mountain range in far northern North America stretching some 700 miles (1,100 km) from west to east across northern Alaska into Canada's Yukon Territory. Reaching a peak elevation of 8,976 feet (2,736 m) on Mount Isto, the range is believed to be approximately 126 million years old.
The Alaska North Slope is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western side of Point Barrow, and the Beaufort Sea on the eastern. With the exception of the highway connecting Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, the region is disconnected from the rest of the Alaskan road system and relies mostly on waterways and small airports for transportation due to the Brooks Range secluding the region from the rest of the state.
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is an American national park that protects portions of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. The park is the northernmost national park in the United States, situated entirely north of the Arctic Circle. The area of the park and preserve is the second largest in the U.S. at 8,472,506 acres ; the National Park portion is the second largest in the U.S., after the National Park portion of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
The Colville River is a major river of the Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska in the United States, approximately 350 miles (560 km) long. One of the northernmost major rivers in North America, it drains a remote area of tundra on the north side of the Brooks Range entirely above the Arctic Circle in the southwestern corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The river is frozen for more than half the year and floods each spring.The Colville River and its adjacent hills are home to a variety of Arctic wildlife, including Lake Teshekpuk and Central Arctic caribou herds, and hawks.
The Gwichʼin are an Athabaskan-speaking First Nations people of Canada and an Alaska Native people. They live in the northwestern part of North America, mostly north of the Arctic Circle.
The question of whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been an ongoing political controversy in the United States since 1977. As of 2017, Republicans have attempted to allow drilling in ANWR almost fifty times, finally being successful with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
The Porcupine caribou(Rangifer tarandus arcticus) is a herd or ecotype of barren-ground caribou, the subspecies of the reindeer or caribou found in Alaska, United States, and Yukon and the Northwest Territories, Canada.
Laurence T. Fessenden is an American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer. He is the founder of the New York based independent production outfit Glass Eye Pix. His writer/director credits include No Telling, Habit (1997), Wendigo (2001), and The Last Winter, which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. He has also directed the television feature Beneath (2013), an episode of the NBC TV series Fear Itself (2008) entitled "Skin and Bones", and a segment of the anthology horror-comedy film The ABCs of Death 2 (2014). He is the writer, with Graham Reznick, of the BAFTA Award-winning Sony PlayStation video game Until Dawn. He has acted in numerous films including Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), I Sell the Dead (2009), Jug Face (2012), We Are Still Here (2015), In a Valley of Violence (2016), Like Me (2017), and The Dead Don't Die (2019), Brooklyn 45 (2023), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Glass Eye Pix is an American independent film studio based in New York City, New York known primarily for producing horror films.
The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) is an area of land on the Alaska North Slope owned by the United States federal government and managed by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It lies to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which, as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed National Wildlife Refuge, is also federal land.
The wildlife of Alaska is both diverse and abundant. The Alaskan Peninsula provides an important habitat for fish, mammals, reptiles, and birds. At the top of the food chain are the bears. Alaska contains about 70% of the total North American brown bear population and the majority of the grizzly bears, as well as black bears and Kodiak bears. In winter, polar bears can be found in the Kuskokwim Delta, St. Matthew Island, and at the southernmost portion of St. Lawrence Island. Other major mammals include moose and caribou, bison, wolves and wolverines, foxes, otters and beavers. Fish species are extensive, including: salmon, graylings, char, rainbow and lake trout, northern pike, halibut, pollock, and burbot. The bird population consists of hundreds of species, including: bald eagles, owls, falcons, ravens, ducks, geese, swans, and the passerines. Sea lions, seals, sea otters, and migratory whales are often found close to shore and in offshore waters. The Alaskan waters are home to two species of turtles, the leatherback sea turtle and the green sea turtle. Alaska has two species of frogs, the Columbia spotted frog and wood frog, plus two introduced species, the Pacific tree frog and the red-legged frog. The only species of toad in Alaska is the western toad. There are over 3,000 recorded species of marine macroinvertebrates inhabiting the marine waters, the most common being the various species of shrimp, crab, lobster, and sponge.
The Alaskan hare, also known as the tundra hare, is a species of mammal in the family Leporidae. They do not dig burrows and are found in the open tundra of western Alaska and the Alaska Peninsula in the United States. They are solitary for most of the year except during mating season, when they produce a single litter of up to eight young. Predators include birds of prey and polar bears, as well as humans.
The Nunamiut or Nunatamiut are semi-nomadic inland Iñupiat located in the northern and northwestern Alaskan interior, mostly around Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska.
Oil on Ice is a 2004 documentary film directed by Bo Boudart and Dale Djerassi. It explores the Arctic Refuge drilling controversy in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the impact of oil and gas development on the land, wildlife, and lives of the Gwich'in Athabascan Indians and Inupiat Eskimos.
Anthony Dauksza was an American football player, film-maker, and outdoorsman. In 1971, he became the first person to traverse the Northwest Passage in anything other than a ship. Dauksza completed the 3,200-mile journey over the course of six summers on a solo canoe expedition.
Depraved is a 2019 American horror film written and directed by Larry Fessenden and starring David Call and Joshua Leonard. It is a modern version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The reindeer is a widespread and numerous species in the northern Holarctic, being present in both tundra and taiga. Originally, the reindeer was found in Scandinavia, eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, and northern China north of the 50th latitude. In North America, it was found in Canada, Alaska, and the northern contiguous USA from Washington to Maine. In the 19th century, it was apparently still present in southern Idaho. It also occurred naturally on Sakhalin, Greenland, and probably even in historical times in Ireland.