Below Zero 2011

Jack, Edward Furlong, is an aspiring screenwriter who dreams of crafting a movie about a man locked inside a freezer. To tell that story with conviction, he believes he must endure the cold firsthand, traveling to a remote, wintry location to push his own limits. On the road, he meets Penny, Kristin Booth, a quirky woman whose Fargo-esque accent hints at a rough, small-town past, and whose son has grown quiet after his father walked away years ago because he couldn’t accept a son who was “different.” Penny is all-in to help him, and Jack’s agent has provided the directions he needs to reach the appointed place. They drive to an old slaughterhouse where Jack begins his self-imposed trial; Penny locks him inside and delivers the blunt ultimatum that he must stay there for five days. The door shuts, and the temperature of suspense begins to rise, though the air in the freezer hasn’t yet turned frigid.

As the days unfold, the story that Jack is writing unfurls on screen in tandem with his own real-world ordeal. The on-screen movie he constructs is bleak and dreary, bathed in green tones, while the “real world” action inside the freezer is a cool, blue-tinted world of its own. In this nested narrative, a character named Frank—the on-screen stand-in for Jack—drives a tow truck, and his friend Marty works at a garage. The credits even note that the same actor who plays Marty is supposedly Jack’s agent in the outside world, a meta touch that blurs the lines between creator and creation. Jack’s writing process becomes a second current within the film, as he makes script changes and watches the scene “rewind” and rewrite itself using different cinematic tricks.

Meanwhile, the external pressure tightens. Frank encounters trouble after an incident inspired by a prior encounter with cows and must search for a phone in a sparsely populated landscape. His journey leads him to a discarded butcher shop where Gunnar, Michael Berryman, is violently attacking his meat, a figure both unsettling and menacing. Gunnar’s presence is amplified by his eerie, silent son, whose muteness adds to the sense of danger surrounding them. Frank manages to reach a phone and calls Marty, but Gunnar interrupts the call, declaring that Frank isn’t there and that he must be hiding. The tension between confinement and escape grows as Jack’s script keeps shifting, and the film’s structure continues to tilt between the real world and the world within the movie.

As the writing and the confinement progress, Jack’s narrative experience becomes increasingly intertwined with the reality around him. The set-up in the old slaughterhouse—where the exposure to cold is not just physical but psychological—drives him toward a pivotal moment when the film-within-a-film reaches a new turn. In the frame story, Frank discovers Paige, who is being held prisoner, and Marty appears again, though his arrival does not bring the relief one might expect; Gunnar’s intimidation endures. A flashback later in the tale offers additional texture about Gunnar and the unsettling energy he embodies. It reveals more about the other role the actor behind Gunnar has played, underscoring the movie’s fascination with characters who are terrifying in different ways.

Throughout, the piece keeps a steady, neutral tone while allowing the atmosphere to grow with each beat. The contrast between the green-tinted on-screen world and the blue-tinged real-world confinement creates a visual metaphor for the tension between imagination and reality, between the script and the life it attempts to imitate. The narrative doesn’t rush toward a single, neat resolution; instead, it maintains a calm, measured pace that invites viewers to follow Jack’s dual journeys—one through the act of writing, the other through the physical and emotional challenges of being trapped in a cold space.

In the end, the film remains a careful study of craft under pressure. It presents two intertwined experiences—the act of creating a movie about a man in a freezer, and the man who puts himself in a freezer to understand that fiction more deeply. The interplay between Jack’s internal struggle and the external dangers faced by Frank, Penny, Gunnar, and the other figures in the story forms a compact meditation on perseverance, fear, and the blurry line between storytelling and lived experience. The result is a dense, atmospheric meditation that rewards close attention and savoring the details of both worlds.