Film Review: Wind Chill

About the film

Wind Chill is a 2007 horror film. It has a run time of 97 minutes and is rated 15.

Plot

Struggling to find a ride home for Christmas, an unknown girl trawls the ‘ride board’ looking for someone going her way. She’s in luck when an unknown guy is heading to Delaware as well and they agree to share the ride. The girl knows literally nothing about the guy although he seems to know quite a lot about her. While on the journey, he takes a scenic short cut where they get into an accident and break down. A weather report on the radio lets them know about an incoming storm and temperatures below 30 degrees but it looks as though the pair are going nowhere and the stretch of road they’re stuck on has a terrible history.

Cast

Emily Blunt ... Girl

Ashton Holmes … Guy

Martin Donovan ... Highway Patrolman

Ned Bellamy … Snowplow Driver

Ian A. Wallace ... Priest (as Ian Wallace)

Donny James Lucas ... Stranger (as Donny Lucas)

Chelan Simmons ... Blonde Girl

Darren Moore ... Clerk        

Linden Banks … Proctor

What I thought

Around Halloween there are always plenty of random horror films on late at night. I had never even heard of this one before but seeing as there wasn’t much else on at the time, I decided to give it a go.

Emily Blunt stars as the unnamed girl, known only as Girl in the credits. It’s the day before Christmas Eve and she doesn’t have a ride back to her home in Delaware so she finds someone else who is going that way to help her out. She has no idea who the guy is (played by Ashton Holmes and known as Guy in the credits). A large chunk of the film is spent getting to know both characters and this is when we find out that the guy knows much more about the girl than he initially let on. The girl gets really creeped out by this and when he takes a detour, she begs him to get back on the highway but he doesn’t. This results in them getting lost, being in an accident and ending up stranded with the temperature dropping quickly.

The girl comes across as pretty mean and self-centred while the boy really doesn’t have much going for him at all. Put that together with the fact that neither character has a name, it makes each of them quite unlikeable and I certainly struggled to connect with either of them. By the time they are in the car crash, I really didn’t care about what happened to them and really, this is when the film gets going. Both characters fail to show much emotion until near the end of the film and by this point, they could have died an awful, painful death and I still wouldn’t have cared.

However, while the characters in this film were a complete let down, the plot does make things slightly better, although not completely. The whole film had a pretty creepy feeling to it from beginning to end which I really liked. Getting into a car for a long drive without someone you don’t know would definitely make me feel quite uncomfortable and the girl also feels like this as the journey goes on. Then, the weather, the snow, makes for a quite strange looking film as there is so much white around all of the time. I have always found long stretches of white road to be pretty eerie. I liked the whole road trip aspect of the film but then this was let down by the fact that there isn’t much character development.

It is only when the couple are in a car accident that the horror really kicks in. Not only are they lost but they have no food and are stranded on a long stretch of snowy road. It’s extremely cold and there is no way of getting back to the nearest town without the use of their car. Wind Chill is very much a ghost story but it is more creepy than scary which was unfortunate. There were moments that could have ended up being quite terrifying but they fell short in my opinion. From here, while the plot did take quite a dark turn, it wasn’t executed well enough in my opinion. There wasn’t enough background story, the characters weren’t scared enough and the things that should have been really scary, weren’t.

So, overall, I found Wind Chill to be quite bland as horror films go although it could have been a whole lot better.