The Thaw Review (Film, 2009) The Archives
The Thaw is a global warming-tinged spin on The Thing. A group of students are invited up to an Arctic research center to study the effect of the melting icecaps on native polar bear populations. They discover an abandoned laboratory with no power and a quickly rotting polar bear corpse inside. Soon people start getting attacked by insects and releasing viscous sludge out of their mouths.
The beginning of The Thaw has a lot of potential. The opening sequence is cut together with a lot of staged footage of politicians and scientists arguing different aspects, pro and con, of global climate change. This is juxtaposed with the research happening at the station and a college class learning which students have the honor of joining the expedition. It’s a great punchy start that establishes the stakes and builds a lot of tension.
And then it goes downhill for a good long time. The interesting scientific—specifically, rhetoric about scientific research—angle disappears. It’s replaced with annoying personal drama designed to build connections with the characters. We don’t need to know that the head researched is hated by his daughter because he missed the mother’s funeral. We don’t need to know that two students on the expedition used to date until an unidentified big mistake ruined their relationship. Not every story needs to be told in horror.
There is a world of difference between making a meaningful connection with an audience and mad-libbing some extraneous details that have no real bearing on the plot. Artificial connections are just as bad as not even trying to establish characters. The actors in this film do more with the delivery of their lines to establish real character traits than any “but my daddy works in big oil” nonsense ever could.
By the time the action kicks in, people get sick, and the bugs start to take over, we don’t care what happens to the characters. It’s the opposite problem of random body count horror: we’re told so much stuff about the characters that we stop caring about their survival. They’re all so annoying and unfocused on the actual dangers they face that the sudden shift to good science, medicine, and research techniques is totally unbelievable.
With all of that said, The Thaw does have a lot of interesting things to offer. The quality of special effect makeup in the film is top notch. The set design of the laboratory creates a lot of interesting images and angles that enhance the scares. The score, while simple, is quite effective and mixed just right to enhance the tension, not distract from the story.
Fans of body horror, natural disaster, and invasion films will find something to enjoy in The Thaw. You just need to temper your expectations. The film is just not as innovative as it appears to be in the beginning.
The Thaw is streaming on Tubi.
