Why is THE SNOWMAN such a crappy movie?
I feel bad for Jo Nesbo. Hopefully he’s a zillionaire and doesn’t care that they made a shitty movie of his book; he’s sold 36 million books worldwide, which has to soften the blow.
I also feel bad for the people who worked on this movie without knowing that it was going to turn out to be garbage. No one sets out to make a horrible movie, and it probably feels terrible to spend months on something that is universally panned by critics. Especially if you’re a set designer or a camera operator or a prop master or anyone who worked on it without having any real creative control over how the final product turned out. I hope they were all well-paid.
But listen, this movie is very, very, very bad.
There are lots of ways a movie can be bad, of course. I love watching a so-bad-it’s-good movie (Troll 2 or The Room, anyone?) and I also get excited for a certain type of shiny action flick or an overblown Lifetime-style movie about psychotic exes or dramatic kidnappings. Those are pure bliss for me. Badmazing, I call this particular genre. Because in addition to bad movies, I enjoy bad portmanteaus. You’re learning lots about me here.
Some bad movies are just bad in a boring way. Like, it’s not bad enough to be funny, or packed with predictable but still effective thrills. It’s just boring. And some movies just feel cheap, like they spent about five seconds writing a script and didn’t give a shit. (Not talking a low-budget movie here, but one that is “cheap in its soul,” to quote Denis Johnson. I’m thinking of The Mummy here, for example).
The Snowman is not bad in these ways. The cinematography is suitably icy and bleak. The acting is competent. The writing, while you’re watching the movie, seems adequate. There are large stretches of the movie that seem like they belong to a different, better movie. The real problem is that it makes no sense. None. It’s a one-hour, fifty-nine minute plot hole. Most bad movies at least sort of make sense. Even if a plot is a dumb plot, it’s usually a complete, dumb plot. This plot is by no means complete. It feels distinctly unfinished, even though it looks polished.
Why is it so bad? Why did this happen?
- It is a terrible representation of the book on which it is based. I had never read anything by Jo Nesbo prior to seeing this film, but as soon as I got home afterward, I ordered the paperback from Amazon because I was so curious as to what pieces of the plot were missing. And it turns out the answer is much stranger than just missing parts. The script diverges hugely from the book, aside from character names and the ultimate guilty party. The circumstances and climax scenes are all different, as if the script was written by someone misremembering the book or, perhaps, by someone who never read the book at all.
- But, even if you take this radically different script at face value, it feels like huge chunks of the movie are missing. Indeed, they are; according to the director, they only filmed 85% of the script.
- Instead of, say, filming the rest of the movie so at least the story was coherent, they spent a shitload of money promoting it: over $5m on television advertising alone. That’s almost 15% of the film’s production budget. I don’t claim to understand how film budgeting works, but it seems to me that finishing your movie is probably a better use of money than throwing it into advertising a movie you know is incomplete.
- Not only did they know it was incomplete, but they knew it was bad! “It was kept away from U.S. critics until Wednesday night and the reviews were embargoed until a few hours before the first public Thursday-night screenings,” according to Slate.com. But they spent a ton of money to advertise it, despite embargoing reviews until the last minute.
Here are some of the major ways the movie is different from the book
Honestly, it’s a pretty good book, so if they had just stuck with the original story, most of these issues would’ve been avoided (well, assuming they filmed the whole thing). But no.
SNOWMAN ORIGIN STORY
Movie: The murderer is shown as a young boy in a rundown farmhouse with his mousy, frightened mother. They get an unexpected visit from the boy’s “uncle,” a police officer who quizzes the boy on Norwegian history and slaps his mother when the boy answers wrong. A jar of coffee beans spills dramatically. Later, the boy sees his mother and the police officer having sex, and Mommy threatens to tell the police officer’s wife that the boy is actually his son. He leaves, angrily, insisting she’ll never see him again. Outside, the boy flings himself in the snow, wailing. Mother and son get in a car and pursue the police officer, but can’t keep up. Then Mommy drives onto a frozen lake and calmly waits to die, despite the pleas from her son to get out of the car as the ice cracks underneath her. The boy escapes from the car and watches his mother’s angelic, depressed face as she drowns.
Book: The boy waits in the car while his mother goes to see her lover, who is moving to another town. There is no bad blood between the characters here, except for maybe between Mom and her husband, who believes the boy is his kid (but he’s wrong!) Mom promised it would only take 10 minutes, but really it’s more like 40. The boy makes a snowman and possibly masturbates with it while watching his mother and the police officer having sex. He observes that the cop has no nipples, a trait which the boy shares, thereby proving paternity, I guess. When his mother comes back to the car, the boy creepily tells her, “We’re going to die.” Then he bashes her head in.
HARRY HOLE
Movie: We meet Inspector Harry Hole on a frozen morning in a city park; he’s holding a bottle of liquor and sleeping on a picnic table in a little hut. He walks home and buys a six pack of beer, then almost shoots a man in his apartment who is there to repair mold damage in the walls. There is a dog in the apartment, and it’s not clear who the dog belongs to. Later Harry goes to work and opens his mail — there’s a strange letter about a snowman. He initiates a conversation with a new officer, Katrine Bratt, who has recently transferred from the town of Bergen. He is immediately suspicious of her, for no reason. While they are investigating the disappearance of a young mother from her house in the middle of the night, Harry sneaks a peek at the files in Katrine’s bag: a 9 year old murder case in which the wife of an engineer disappeared and was later found chopped up on a mountain in Bergen.
Book: Harry seems to be a recovering alcoholic. He meets Katrine at a meeting in his office and isn’t suspicious of her.
RAKEL, OLEG & MATHIAS
Movie: Harry has a former lover, Rakel. He still likes her, but she’s involved with Mathias now, a plastic surgeon and all-around good guy who gamely prescribes sleeping pills for Harry’s insomnia. Oleg, Rakel’s son, doesn’t like Mathias much and prefers Harry.
Book: Same, except Mathias is an emergency room doctor and Anatomy Department lecturer. Also we learn early and awkwardly that his blood type is B-negative. Harry and Mathias have a strange conversation about how Mathias may or may not have scleroderma, a painful connective tissue disease.
MYSTERIOUS TECHNOLOGY
Movie: A lot of time is spent on this random computer device thing. Like an iPad, but for crimes. A CrimePad, perhaps. It stores files about cases and is used to record interviews with witnesses on video. It requires a fingerprint to log in.
Book: Not in the book
VAL KILMER
Movie: In a flashback to 9 years ago, Kilmer plays Gert Rafto, a grizzled Bergen detective whom we meet while he is interviewing the engineer husband of Leila Aasen, who has disappeared. The husband believes she’s having an affair with Arve Stop, his business partner. Exhibit A: a photo from the company’s annual report which shows Leila looking lustily at Stop. (There is also the matter of Kilmer’s incredibly bizarre, overdubbed performance, but that is beside the point.) Rafto then takes a cable car up the mountain and sees the chopped up body of Leila Aasen. Then he’s back at his office and he climbs out a window when people talk shit about him. Then someone blows his head off with a shotgun and replaces his head with a snowman head. (It has coffee beans for features!)
Book: Rafto takes a cable car up a mountain to the crime scene. He never speaks to Leila’s husband. He does, however, speak to Leila’s friend, who disappears. Then he gets a phone call from the Snowman, asking for a meeting. Because Rafto is disgraced and eager to restore his rep, he meets with the caller. When he gets there, he realizes that he knows this person, but does not reveal the identity to us readers. The Snowman makes him disappear. It is commonly accepted by the Bergen police that Rafto probably killed Leila and her friend, and then committed suicide. He owns a cabin that is inexplicably never searched until now, when Katrine and Harry do it. They discover Rafto shoved into his own freezer, with his mouth nailed shut.
THE BECKERS
Movie: Birte Becker disappears, leaving her young daughter home alone. The police find her calendar, which reveals a doctor’s appointment at a clinic that performs abortions.
Book: Birte Becker disappears, leaving her son home alone. There is a snowman outside her house. Her cell phone is found inside the snowman. Her husband is a cold, complicated physics professor. He discovers his wife’s calendar after she disappears, which contains a complicated code. Her husband cracks the code, figures out that it’s a schedule by which she meets men she’s been sleeping with. One of them runs a moving company. Becker threatens his wife, who then disappears. For a hot second, the police think Becker is the Snowman Killer and the moving company guy’s wife is his latest victim, but really she’s fine, and she just ran away because she’s mad at her husband for sleeping with Birte.
THE OTTERSENS
Movie: Sylvia Ottersen is reported missing by her husband, who specifically requests Inspector Hole. Harry and Katrine go to her house and find the house empty, with very loud music playing. That annoying “Popcorn” song. But Sylvia is alive and well in the barn, in the act of killing some chickens. They leave, only to get another call that she has been reported missing. Despite the fact that they literally just spoke to her, they go back and find that she has vanished for real this time.
Book: Sylvia is reported missing. Her head is found as the head of a snowman in the forest near the house. She has twin daughters, who have secretly been going to a doctor for treatment for a hereditary disease that neither Sylvia or her husband have. It turns out Birte Becker’s son was also being treated by the same doctor, who is a friend of Arve Stop. Before she died, Sylvia killed some chickens but one chicken was killed long after the other chickens or something.
DR. IDAR VETLESEN
Movie: Doctor is seen opening his front door for a frightened-looking woman, who he then takes to a fancy party and offers her to Arve Stop in a secret meeting in an auditorium, which Katrine films using her weird CrimePad. The doctor exposes her breasts and Stop takes a picture with his phone. When the police meet with the doctor at his home, he has partially painted toenails which is, I guess, shorthand for being creepy. Birte Becker’s cell phone later pings at his house. Someone calls Harry’s desk to inform him of this development, but he isn’t there. Katrine answers, sneaks over to Vetlesen’s house by herself, and discovers him in the garage, dead, his head blown off and replaced by a snowman head. Birte Becker and Sylvia Ottersen are found in his freezer.
Book: Vetlesen plays curling (curls? Whatever you call the act of doing the sport called curling) with Stop and allegedly treats him for “tennis elbow.” He also hangs around a hotel notorious for hosting prostitutes a lot. He’s a plastic surgeon but also a secret specialist in Fahr’s disease, which Arve Stop has. It turns out that Birte and Sylvia both had kids fathered by Stop, and he paid for them to be treated by his friend because he knew he could count on Vetlesen’s discretion. But Vetlesen turns up dead at the curling club, an apparently suicide. The police think he was the Snowman until Harry proves that he could not have committed suicide after all, meaning the Snowman is still out there. Also it’s discovered that he was not sleeping with the prostitutes, but rather, providing them with free medical care.
ARVE STOP
Movie: Stop is a real estate developer or something. His mission is to bring the next World Cup to Oslo. Katrine is convinced that he is the Snowman. After Vetlesen is found dead, she goes to a gala Stop is hosting on the night of the World Cup announcement and propositions him. He gives her his room key. She waits for him in his room and sets up her CrimePad to record the encounter. It is not clear what she’s doing there. Perhaps hoping he will try to murder her and then she can kill him? But instead, the Snowman gets to her first and cuts off her finger so he can operate her CrimePad. When Stop reaches his room, it’s empty.
Book: Stop is the owner of a political magazine, suffers from Fahr’s syndrome, and sleeps with lots of women. Katrine propositions him at an anniversary gala for his magazine, and he invites her to his home. There, she attacks him and tries to torture him into confessing.
KATRINE BRATT
Movie: It turns out that she is Gert Rafto’s daughter! Hence her obsession with Arve Stop, since she believes he’s the one who killed her father. After her apparent vanishing act from Stop’s hotel room, she turns up dead in her car in front of Harry’s apartment.
Book: It turns out that she is Gert Rafto’s daughter! After she flees from Stop’s apartment, she throws her coat into the river so Harry will think she committed suicide. Harry is too smart for that, but he does start to think that SHE is the Snowman, especially after he discovers that the letter he received from the Snowman was printed on a rare, fancy type of paper that he finds in her printer. Harry tracks her back to her father’s cabin and they face off. He’s still convinced she’s the Snowman. She seems insane now and is put in a mental hospital. She claims that she wrote the letter because she needed Harry’s help in finding the Snowman, but that she is not the killer.
THE CLIMAX
Movie: Harry realizes the killer is Mathias, Rakel’s boyfriend! It kind of comes out of nowhere. His motive has something to do with punishing women who had abortions, but also wanting to take down the Great Harry Hole. His involvement with Rakel is for this purpose. He’s a plastic surgeon, yes, but also a gene or hormone researcher (?) and has treated or tested all of the women who were killed. He kidnaps Rakel and Oleg and takes them to the decrepit farmhouse where it all began. Harry tracks them there and saves them, getting his thumb sliced off in the process. Then he chases Mathias out onto the ice. The ice breaks and Mathias falls in.
Book: Harry realizes the killer is Mathias, Rakel’s boyfriend! It still kind of comes out of nowhere and the discovery is related to him having no nipples and answering the door to Rakel’s house without a shirt; his arms are crossed awkwardly but not to cover the lack of nipples. Rather, to cover an injury he sustained when killing Sylvia Ottersen. (He bled on the floor, so he then killed another chicken to cover up his blood with his own blood. I don’t know, it seems very Norwegian, no?) His motive has nothing to do with abortion but is about punishing women he sees as “whores,” women who have children by men other than their husbands. Harry tries to trick Mathias by asking him to wait at his own house so Harry can drop off something for Oleg, but the trick is on Harry because Mathias is actually hiding in Rakel’s house at the moment. He stuffs Oleg in a freezer and rigs up an elaborate situation for Rakel with a snowman built in her house — he puts her on top of it with a sort of piano-wire thing around her neck, so she has no choice but to balance on the snowman or else her head will get cut off. Harry saves her but gets his middle finger cut off in the process. Then he chases Mathias up a mountain and prevents him from committing suicide so he can suffer a painful death from scleroderma in prison.
Things that are the same between the book and the movie
- Snowmen
- Norway
- Character names
- Sylvia Ottersen has a twin sister (though this is important in neither book nor movie)
- Mathias is the killer
Basically, not very many things. The changes the movie made are totally inexplicable. Movie versions of books, especially long books, often have to be slimmed down to fit in the movie space. That makes perfect sense. But that isn’t what happened here. They didn’t cut too much — they added too much, and reworked all of it, for no reason.
In conclusion
I leave you with this amazing Wikipedia plot summary (which I swear I didn’t write, but wish I had):
When Harry Hole, an elite crime squad’s lead detective (Fassbender), investigates the disappearance of a victim on the first snow of winter, he fears an elusive serial killer nicknamed “The Snowman” may be active again. With the help of a brilliant recruit (Ferguson), the detective must connect decades-old cold cases to the brutal new one if he hopes to outwit this unthinkable evil before the next snowfall. At the beginning, there is 20 minutes of nothing missed. Something about coffee beans. After watching everyone smoke for 20 minutes, a woman goes missing and Harry Hole starts randomly investigating the killings and stealing confidential information. JK Simmons is in this, but it is never explained and the pieces are never put together. There are some snowmen features, and the blonde girl from “Big Love” is in it but her character is in it for absolutely no reason. Val Kilmer is Rebecca Ferguson’s dad, and his voice is dubbed over for some reason and the words don’t match his mouth. He is murdered and it’s clearly a set up but ruled a suicide because apparently the cops in Norway are garbage. You will have no idea what year it is in this movie. There is also a lot of time spent with Harry’s ex, her son and new boyfriend, who ends up being The Snowman. You also have no idea if Rebecca Ferguson is dead or just loses a finger. Also, there is a weird point where Harry just lays on top of Rebecca for way too long to calm her down and it is quite awkward. Then The Snowman falls through the ice and dies because why would you have a fun fight or death at the end. Harry Hole also loses a finger, and gets a sweet metal one and the last scene is him tapping his finger on the cup and annoying everyone in the room by doing that.
THE END
