There’s a unique heartbreak to realizing our parents aren’t who we imagined. A Long Winter is about that agony, and how one might grow from it.
From English writer/director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, All of Us Strangers) A Long Winter centers on a quietly queer protagonist, who comes to understand himself and what he wants through the hard, cold lesson of who his parents really are. And the result is elegant in its heartbreak.
What is A Long Winter About?
Credit: TIFF
Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s short story of the same name, A Long Winter is set in the brutally cold mountains of Colorado, during the early 1950s. There, despite the hard work of maintaining the house and farm animals, Mike (Fear Street‘s Fred Hechinger) enjoys a rather blissful existence, relishing the time with his younger brother (Heartstopper‘s Kit Connor), his mother (Outlander‘s Caitríona Balfe), and father (The Bear‘s Ebon Moss-Bachrach). However, once his brother takes a job far away, Mike witnesses another side of his parents, one tarnished by regret and recrimination.
As another winter approaches, his mother Louise’s smiles turn to snarls. Her empty water glass reeks of alcohol, and her fury at her hard-headed husband Lester boils over. One day, she wanders off with their dog Sandy. Hours later, a blizzard turns the familiar hills to treacherous, frigid white. Where did she go? Could she have survived?
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For months, Mike will seek her out in the not-so-near town, an abandoned mine, the home of his posh uncle (a terrifically festering Martin Freeman), and again and again in the long, blank expanse of the mountain.
In his search, he has time and space to reflect, and so comes across a better understanding of who his mother was, who his father is, and what he wants for his own life. Mike also makes a new acquaintance in Jimmy (Reservation Dogs‘ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), an abandoned teen Lester brings on to do the “women’s work” on the property that neither he nor his son has any talent for.
Fred Hechinger delivers his best performance yet in A Long Winter.
Credit: TIFF
Hechinger first hit my radar in 2021, playing the chaotically charismatic Simon in Fear Street: Part One – 1994. Where others in the film had to deliver the horror of the slasher’s slaughters, Simon was reliably and warmly the comic relief. Hechinger brought Matthew Lillard vibes, offering an unapologetically gawky confidence and sharp comedic timing.
From there, he’d earn praise for his role as Quinn on White Lotus Season 1. Then, in 2024, he popped up in a string of movies, taking on wildly different supporting roles. In Thelma, he was a doting grandson. In Nickel Boys, he was a friendly face amid a squadron of abusive school staffers. Gladiator II gave him a chance to play a villain, opposite his onscreen twin emperor Joseph Quinn. Then, in Kraven The Hunter, he played the title character’s demure younger brother, Dmitri “Chameleon” Smerdyakov, who used his power to sing like Harry Styles, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tony Bennett.
Simply put, Hechinger has swiftly established himself as an actor who is exciting at every appearance, because you never know where he might go.
In A Long Winter, Hechinger packs away his goofy grin and playfulness for a more restrained yet brilliantly alive performance. In the first act, Mike recounts to his brother about how, when he went away for contracted work, he missed home, reminiscing in his childhood bed about his family and the meals his mother made. In these scenes, his voice has a folksy touch, while his word choice is simple. But after weeks without his mother and months without his brother, with Jimmy in the bed beside him, Mike’s accent has softened, and he’ll use words like “cope,” which feel out of place in his father’s idea of mountain masculinity. These simple diction shifts reflect how Mike’s vision for himself has become less reliant on his father’s example, even as his is the only one around.
Frustratingly, Moss fumbles in his role as the tough guy, much like he did in Broadway’s Dog Day Afternoon. His bluster feels flaccid, making the years his wife submitted to his demands a bit perplexing. In scenes where Moss and Hechinger face off, A Long Winter struggles when the former cannot match the latter in onscreen intensity, even though the younger actor is playing openness rather than rage.
Hechinger, who has been a stellar supporting player, proves his leading man chops by shouldering A Long Winter in scenes of delicate dialogue, earnest confrontation, and moments alone, where it’s just Mike and the wilderness that has likely consumed his lost and loved mother.
A Long Winter works as a sister film All of Us Strangers.
Credit: TIFF
Make no mistake, A Long Winter won’t be as gut-wrenching or as hot as Haigh’s last film. Yet both share a common core. Both center on a gay man learning to trust himself and his desire, while making sense of who his parents are/were. The intensity of All of Us Strangers perfectly encapsulates the first stage of such scary journeys, enhanced by the ghost story elements that make the film a soft horror movie.
In A Long Winter, the arc is less rigorous because Mike — unlike Andrew Scott‘s hero — is not alone. All of Us Strangers plays, in some respects, like a haunted house movie because of its protagonist’s isolation. While Haigh will bring in some surreal and spooky elements to A Long Winter, it’s not horror. Instead, he lets the reality of a scene bend to reflect the yearning of his hero, who’s coming to realize that death — like winter — is a part of life that is unavoidable, but not inherently bad.
There’s a profound maturity in Haigh’s latest, as he trusts Hechinger to infuse mood and growth without genre flourishes or the actor’s signature mirth. Keen performances by Balfe, Freeman, and Woon-A-Tai bolster their vision of this world, cold but wondrous. It is not a tearjerker, but a rapturous and meditative look at growing up and growing into ourselves.
A Long Winter was reviewed out its Canadian Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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