Haigh's first film since "All of Us Strangers" is austere enough to risk alienating its audience. Yet it's told with a quiet confidence that lures you. One definition of great cinematography is pretty pictures that move.
On that score, “A Long Winter,” the majestically moody new drama written and directed by Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers”), more than qualifies. It’s set on a remote farm nestled high in the Rocky Mountains in the early 1950s, and the images — of jutting peaks and plunging valleys, of endless stretches of pine, of the craggy frosted grandeur of it all — are vivid enough to carry you away. Yet the real definition of great cinematography is when a filmmaker, working with a bold camera artist (in this case, André Turpin), frames the images so they don’t just dazzle but lure the audience, unfolding the action with a shimmering inquiry and suspense, as if each shot were another sentence in the story it’s telling.
That’s the way “A Long Winter” works. Based on a novella by Colm Tóibín, it’s a film austere enough to risk alienating its audience, yet once you get onto its wavelength you stay right there, inside the movie’s world. For a while, “A Long Winter” is so authentically homespun that you may feel primed for a kind of art-house Laura Ingalls Wilder experience.
In a stately, creaky mountainside farmhouse, Mikey (Fred Hechinger) and Tom (Kit Connor) are adult brothers who sleep in beds right next to each other. They have a caring and respectful relationship that feels pre-media enough to seem downright exotic. But Tom is impatient with their sedentary lives, raising chickens and rabbits (which they sell for their pelts).
He’s about to leave for Army service in Korea. Mikey, by contrast, says he loves this life — the tranquility of it, which he finds comforting. He left for a while too (to go to Idaho), but ultimately came back.
As the two have dinner with their parents, the taciturn Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and the radiant Louise (Caitríona Balfe), the movie shows us what it’s like to feel protected by an old-world American family coziness. It’s soon apparent, though, that there are dark clouds adrift in this clan. Loise, vibrant but tense, gets through her days by drinking wine.
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