You know those scenes in thrillers or horror films when help finally arrives, lulling the audience into a false sense of hope, only for the filmmakers to kill off that hope in abject cynicism? In The Shining, Stanley Kubrick goes through the trouble of letting us get attached to Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), a would-be savior, before Jack hacks him with an axe. In Misery, Richard Farnsworth’s Sheriff John T. Buster McCain is brutally slain by deranged superfan Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), just at the moment he might free author Paul Sheldon (James Cann).

Dead of Winter is something of a reversal of that formula. Barb (Emma Thompson) is a widowed fisherwoman whose stereotypically Minnesotan hokum would be comically exaggerated in a lesser actor’s hands. She looks and acts like a cross between Mrs. Claus and McGuyver, apologizing for the usage of the “curse word” damn in between clever repurposing of everyday materials.

Its structure and slow bleed of character information reeks of self-consciousness, untrustworthy of its ability to hold tension.

Barb is on a sad vacation. She’s driving across the wintry tundra of Minnesota’s back woods (in reality, Finland, but it’ll do) to the isolated Lake Hilda for some ice fishing. But, really, she’s intent on paying tribute to her late husband by scattering his ashes at the location of their unusual first date.

Why Barb is intent on doing this now, when it is clearly unsafe to be trudging through the snow in a beat-up old truck, is beyond reasonable explanation, but nonethless she gets lost right outside a dusty old cabin where Purple Lady and Camo Jacket (Judy Greer and Marc Menchaca, respectively credited as such, for some reason) have kidnapped the young Leah (Laurel Marsden) for reasons as yet unknown. Suddenly, Barb must transform into the sweet, marmy version of Bruce Willis’s John McClane from Die Hard.

Dead of Winter Is Unnecessarily Complicated By Its Flashback Structure

It’s a fun premise, and Nicholas Jacoson-Larson and Dalton Leeb set it all up pretty efficiently — at first. Here’s a kind woman, whose weathered and perpetual smile belies a broken heart, tasked with a type of heroism she has no previous experience with, deep in a snow-covered valley without the possibility of police backup. But, after its juicy first act, the writers opt for a mystery box unraveling of detail that never really serves the story, and Brian Kirk’s direction is clunky and ham-fisted. The end result is sputtery action that’s only sporadically tense.

There isn’t any reason why a story this simple should be so convoluted upon delivery, nor why we shouldn’t be privy to the pertinent details. Here’s what we do know beyond Barb’s grief: Greer’s character is dying, with an incessant nose bleed and a dose of fentanyl in the side of her mouth like she’s Clint Eastwood with a toothpick in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Her husband is kind of a dope, but through heavy-footed exposition, it’s clear the couple has robbed a pharmacy at gunpoint and kidnapped Leah in the process.

Much of the film’s other “information” is doled out via Hallmark-esque flashbacks where Emma Thompson’s real-life daughter Gaia Wise plays her younger self, in scenes that don’t do much except show us just how nice their relationship was. Otherwise, the film does not give us a ton in the way of plot, which is earnestly okay. When the film relies on Thompson’s and Greer’s extraordinary ability to elevate their material, or on its own Rube Goldberg set pieces, it does pretty well. Its structure and slow bleed of character information reeks of self-consciousness, untrustworthy of its ability to hold tension.

Thompson and Greer really are extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête nearly saves Kirk’s enterprise from the doldrums. With both of them coming to the battlefield in not dissimilar circumstances, they offer starkly different approaches to the handling of grief, the selflessness or lack thereof that might arise in the worst of circumstances. Their respective acting clinics are appreciable efforts, but it is not enough to save Dead of Winter entirely. Whether you’d want to see Barb save Leah is another story, a mystery whose origins are unfortunately frozen in the lake.