Andrew Haigh’s ‘A Long Winter’ explores grief and isolation on a 1950s Colorado farm

Telluride film festivalIn a remote Colorado farmstead, a family with a mother gone missing finds a strange buoyancy and freedom as they wait for the snows to meltAndrew Haigh’s mysterious and beautiful new film is adapted by him from the 2006 story by Colm Tóibín, transplanting the action from the 1930s Spanish Pyrenees to the wintry, vertiginous landscapes of Colorado about the time of the Korean war. It is a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women; it is fiercely acted, and wonderfully shot by cinematographer André Turpin.Lester, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is a grizzled, hardened farmsteader in the remote hills whose family has a certain sufficiency from their livestock; he makes a precarious living breeding rabbits for their meat and fur. One son, Tommy (Kit Connor) is leaving for military service, leaving behind his shy brother Mikey (Fred Hechinger); Mikey has secret gay longings, which are nourished by furtive glimpses of glossy Cosmopolitan magazines, with their impossibly exotic visions of big-city fashion and design. Continue reading...

Based on a novella by Colm Tóibín, it’s a movie austere enough to risk alienating its audience, yet if you get onto its wavelength you stay right there, inside the movie’s world.

Fred Hechinger and Eben Moss-Bachrach are terrific in a queer period drama about a young man trying to escape his father's shadow in 1950s Colorado.

Also featuring Caitríona Balfe, Kit Connor and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the film — adapted from Colm Tóibín's novella — measures the after-effects of a disappearance in the Rocky Mountains in the 1950s.