Frostbitten – Frostbite in English speaking territories – was proudly trumpeted as the first Swedish vampire movie, beating the better known and more high profile Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One to the screen by a couple of years. It hasn’t enjoyed the success or acclaim that was afforded Tomas Alfredson’s film, which is a pity as it’s rather a clever and witty film in its own right.
Annika Wallén (Petra Nielsen) and her teenage daughter Saga (Grete Havnesköld) move to Norrbotten, a town in the north of Sweden where the locals are living in total darkness for a month. She joins a local hospital to work for noted geneticist Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson) who is tending to a a comatose young girl named Maria (Aurora Roald). A young resident at the hospital, Sebastian (Jonas Karlström), takes some of the pills that Beckert has been administering to Maria, in the mistaken belief that they’re ecstasy and is soon consumed with the desire to drink human blood. Annika is bitten by Maria and learns that Beckert is a former Nazi stormtrooper who was turned into a vampire while fighting in the Ukraine in 1944 (which we see in a lengthy prologue) – and the pills that he’s made that create more like him are now in the hands of a group of teenagers at a party, including Saga…
Often extremely funny, adding a few new wrinkles to vampire lore and packed to the gills with genuinely oddball moments (reluctant young vampire Sebastian can understand what dogs are saying to him – and it’s usually not very nice!), Frostbitten is a real find, a completely out-of-the-blue experience the likes of which we rarely get these days. The somewhat eerie Swedish settings (night last for a month and the whole film is shot in darkness or an unsettling half-light) give the film a look that you won’t find anywhere else and the strange sense of humour is refreshingly original. Great performances all round help and director Anders Banke (making an astonishingly assured debut) avoids the usual clichés, though the vampires themselves were, disappointingly, from the Lost Boys/Buffy strain of the undead. That said, they’re still fun – the demon vampire leader is a bit naff, but the teen vampires are hilarious and the climax is first rate as the strangest family unit ever seen in a horror film head off into the darkness.
It’s not a film for those looking for straight horror – Banke is having too much fun with the absurdity of the situation to take things terribly seriously. The characters are all varying degrees of eccentric (Emma Åberg as Saga’s new Goth friend is particularly good fun) and the locations are unusual and well used. It doesn’t all make sense (loose-ends abound) and in his rush to tie up the few strands that he does, Banke rather fumbles the climax, but there are lots of creepy and inventive touches scattered here and there to make up for it.
The humour may seem odd to non-Swedes but therein lies much of Frostbitten’s peculiar charm. It never quite goes where you expect it might and although the sudden shifts from gory horror to humour and back again can seem a little disconcerting, one gets used to them and the slightly chaotic pacing as the film rolls along. Banke stages some odd scenes that linger in the memory (a dog’s unfortunate comfort break for example, or the genuinely eerie sight of undead teenagers swarming over a house like insects) and gets some satisfying mileage from the often spiky relationship between Annika and the moody Saga.
Frostbitten was the most popular homegrown film at the Swedish box office of 2006 and was a hit in Russia which led Banke to create and direct the 16-part thriller television series Chernobyl: Zona otchuzhdeniya/Chernobyl: Zone of Exclusion for Russia’s TV3. It was hugely successful, though sadly Banke’s career hasn’t taken off as it might have done, with only one other feature film – the Russian remake of Johnnie To’s Hong Kong action film Breaking News, Goryachie novosti/Newsmakers (2009) – to his name since his debut.
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