Frozen Days pulls off the trick of being extremely creepy without being gory, scary, or even very suspenseful. Like a fine Twilight Zone episode, this Israeli film makes the utmost use of mood, lighting, and sparseness. It doesn’t hurt the film, of course, that it happens to star one of the most beautiful women any audience will ever see.
Anat Klausner stars as Miao, a drug dealing apartment squatter who meets a man named Alex in an internet chat room. The two meet without seeing each other’s faces (his power is out), and have a playful, sexually charged encounter. Miao bolts when the lights go on, then entices Alex into meeting her at a nightclub. When a suicide bomber blows up the club, Miao narrowly escapes. Alex is not so lucky. What follows is a puzzle of sorts, in which memory, identity, and reality are all liquid and malleable. Like the best Twilight Zone episodes, only the star is aware that something is terribly, terribly off.
The movie plays in black and white (besides a memorable sequence in color), which adds to an unrelenting creepiness that is spoiled only by occasional shots so brazenly artsy that they come across as laughable. The pacing, too, is detrimental to the film - Frozen Days is only 91 minutes but feels at times much longer. Still, it’s often fascinating to see how (and if) the pieces of this puzzle will come together.
MAYBE SO (6/10)
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