The trailer for the next film from Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy director Tomas Alfredson was released Wednesday, and fans of Alfredson’s bleak winter landscapes will find plenty to look forward to in the trailer’s beautiful long shots of snow-covered parking lots and fields. Fans of great acting, too, will be thrilled to see Michael Fassbender getting in touch with his inner Stellan Skarsgard/Al Pacino as a detective relentlessly pursuing his prey across a frozen landscape. But fans of ultra-schlocky horror may be happiest of all, because this film, an adaptation of one of Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels, is about a serial killer known as “the snowman,” which means that it’s in direct competition with 1997’s direct-to-video catastrophe Jack Frost. Not the one with Michael Keaton, mind you—if that had any snowman-themed serial killers in it, they got cut to secure a PG rating—the one with Shannon Elizabeth, directed by Identity writer Michael Cooney. Let’s revisit:
Now that’s how you make a movie about a snowman serial killer! It’s worth remembering that trailers are not movies, and even if Universal has decided to sell The Snowman as though it were an Ashley Judd vehicle from the late 1990s, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything: Alfredson has already made two great movies and deserves the benefit of the doubt. But we’re talking about a lot of doubt here: We know from the trailer that, at a minimum, Rebecca Ferguson goes sexily undercover to lure the killer into the open while Fassbinder offers trenchant observations like “The only thing we know for sure is that he’s playing games with us,” “There’s something we’re not seeing,” and “He’s taunting us.” It’s not as ridiculous as Jack Frost’s opening car crash, in which the “State Executional Transfer Vehicle” smashes into a tanker truck full of genetic material, producing a killer snowman. But Michael Cooney knew exactly what kind of snowman serial killer movie he was making. If The Snowman turns out to be as unintentionally hilarious as its trailer, it may turn out that Alfredson did not.
