While this film is not "new" in the purest sense (it was made in 2017,) it is new in the sense that it is being pushed on Netflix right now at least in my area. It has a big budget, lots of stars, and a decent enough story in a thriller genre, but unfortunately, it is a massive snowy disappointment.
As always, I try to avoid all spoilers but if you like to enter a film blind you may wish to skip this
Basically, i don't think this film is very good and for the most part it is not something I consider to be valuable. I believe that that they use the fact that there is a snowman involved to try to capitalize on their level of Christmas films but I can go ahead and confirm now that this movie has absolutely nothing to do with the Christmas spirit and unlike Die-Hard, i don't think there is really any wiggle-room for argument here.
To keep this brief and spoiler-free I'll just be vague and say that in Oslo, Norway there is a killer that has emerged that instead of just killing seems to taunt the victims as well as authorities with riddles all based around a snowman (hence, the name of the film) and while we are only show bits of it, the killer stalks their victims by creating a snowman around their property to get them all freaked out before killing them.
For me, this portion of the film was ridiculous. I grew up in Nebraska where the winters are absolutely brutal, and even though i left there when i was 12 I know that there are only very specific temperature-specific situations in which snowman-creation is even possible at all. So that part of the movie made me upset. It also is very unlikely that you are going to be able to make an entire snowman without being noticed since by the end of it all, the bottom portion of your average snowman probably weighs as much as a person and used all the snow in the yard.
Ok, let's get away from the physical impossibility of a stealth-op and just focus on the good parts of the film.
I think that since this film is 2 years old and has a snowy theme, we can conclude that it is pulled out of the closet every year during Christmas in order to lure people into watching it under the auspices that it is going to be a fun thriller or even a horror movie. It is none of these things.
In the end we have a mess of a movie that has too much going on at once and a villain that once they are revealed is so removed from the entire thing that it doesn't make even an iota of sense that they would ever have been who we were looking for in the first place. It isn't a "gotcha!" moment... it is a "oh give me a fucking break!" moment.
This film is not good and i suspect that is why they didn't make it available (at least obviously) on Netflix until the past couple of weeks.
This movie can easily be skipped and I recommend that you do precisely that. If you want to see a good thriller. Go watch a Korean movie and read the subtitles such as "Memories of Murder," I Saw the Devil," or if you are one of the few people unaware of it "Oldboy." None of these movies have anything to do with Christmas... but to be fair, neither does "The Snowman."
