A Long Winter review – hope, desire and subversion in Andrew Haigh’s beautiful winter western

Telluride film festival In a remote Colorado farmstead, a family with a mother gone missing finds a strange buoyancy and freedom as they wait for the snows to melt Andrew Haigh’s mysterious and beautiful new film is adapted by him from the 2006 story by Colm Tóibín , transplanting the action from the 1930s Spanish Pyrenees to the wintry, vertiginous landscapes of Colorado about the time of the Korean war. It is a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women; it is fiercely acted, and wonderfully shot by cinematographer André Turpin. Lester, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is a grizzled, hardened farmsteader in the remote hills whose family has a certain sufficiency from their livestock; he makes a precarious living breeding rabbits for their meat and fur. One son, Tommy (Kit Connor) is leaving for military service, leaving behind his shy brother Mikey (Fred Hechinger); Mikey has secret gay longings, which are nourished by furtive glimpses of glossy Cosmopolitan magazines, with their impossibly exotic visions of big-city fashion and design. Continue reading...