Winter Burial: "Centigrade" an effective genre exercise in high-concept minimalism

Centigrade (2020)

87 min.

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Digital & On Demand)

"Never pull over during a blizzard and sleep in your car" seems to be the lesson learned in “Centigrade,” an effective exercise in high-concept minimalism. Similar to other cut-to-the-bone isolation thrillers, like 2010’s Ryan-Reynolds-trapped-in-a-box thriller “Buried” and 2010’s stuck-on-a-ski-lift nightmare “Frozen,” writer-director Brendan Walsh and Daley Nixon skillfully demonstrate how to hold a viewer’s interest without ever actually going anywhere. After the opening text card sets up everything one needs to know, this chamber drama gets right to the “actual events” that happened to a married couple in 2002. As a survival piece—based on actual events or not—“Centigrade” enthralls for most of its confined 87 minutes, but it will sink or swim depending on one’s patience for human fallibility.

Eight-months-pregnant American novelist Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez) and her husband Matt (Vincent Piazza) travel to Norway for a small book tour. Before they get to their hotel, Matt pulls their rental Land Rover over to the side of the road to wait out a blizzard, only to fall asleep. When Naomi wakes up to ice-covered windows and cannot open the passenger door, she is the first to discover that they are snowed in and not getting out anytime soon. Their circa-2002 cell phone has no service, but they have enough food and water to last them for twelve days. Naomi and Matt have different plans in mind: she wants to take their chances, break the glass, and dig through the snow, but he would rather they wait it out and hope someone finds them since they could just freeze to death anyway once they dig themselves out. Days turn to weeks, and if dehydration, frostbite, hypothermia and malnourishment weren't already raising the stakes, you better believe Naomi is having that baby in that car.

Direct and all-A-story, “Centigrade” milks its “what-would-you-do?” scenario for all it’s worth, and it is not afraid to get icky. There is no axe-wielding murderer terrorizing them from the outside of the car, or an outbreak of flesh-eating zombies, or even a pack of rabid wolves. It’s just the elements of nature giving them a hard time. Efficiently getting to the situation at hand, the film opens with Naomi and Matt already trapped in a frozen tundra. How they got there is learned through the married couple’s arguments rather than actually being shown. While it’s admirable that director Brendan Walsh wastes no time, showing Naomi and Matt before their life-or-death dilemma may have given us more of a vivid snapshot of their marriage before they get to squabbling and, hence, added even more urgency.

Genesis Rodriguez (2015’s “Run All Night”) and Vincent Piazza (2016’s “The Intervention”) are the only performers playing off each other, and they are increasingly persuasive in selling what could have been an unbelievable plot hook into a plausibly harrowing situation. The two actors imbue Naomi and Matt with enough individual development to ensure we care about their fates. Inevitably, husband and wife get defensive, bicker, and play the blame game, and when it comes to whether or not they should escape or stay put until help arrives, they are both right. Given her most physically and emotionally challenging role to date, Rodriguez particularly stuns in an affecting scene where Naomi gets reception on her phone and makes her seemingly last call to her father. 

In order for a single-location experiment like this to work, not only must the performances be strong enough (which they are) but the filmmaker must make the most of shooting in such a tiny space. Fortunately, director Brendan Walsh and cinematographer Seamus Tierney are able to mine a much-needed claustrophobia that will purposefully make one stir-crazy. They do an impressive job of varying the camera movements and setups in the SUV without growing stagnant or too repetitive. When we do venture outside the vehicle, it’s to show how bad the characters are stuck. Also, Trey Toy and Matthew Wang’s score (a mixture of violin, piano and booming drums) knows how to keep one edgy. A craftily considered two-hander set in close quarters, “Centigrade” is surely a gambit in cinematic storytelling that makes for an elemental, grimly involving journey. 

Grade: B