There is something especially devastating about the way Andrew Haigh tells stories. His films have always explored the feelings we struggle to articulate and the ways people search for connection when the world feels impossibly cold. After the emotionally devastating All of Us Strangers (2023), Haigh returns with A Long Winter, a much smaller, more restrained story that explores many of the same ideas about grief, identity, and learning how to live with ourselves. It’s a meditative film about the ways loss can fundamentally change us, sometimes forcing us to become an entirely new version of ourselves just to make it through. 

Fred Hechinger stars as Mike, a sensitive young man whose already isolated life begins to unravel when his mother, Louise (Caitríona Balfe), disappears. With his brother (Kit Conner) away in the army, Mike is left to navigate the uncertainty alongside his emotionally unavailable father, Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Hechinger is perfectly cast as the film’s leading sad boy, wearing his character’s vulnerability on his sleeve without ever making it feel performative. From the beginning, you feel for Mike. The few things he cares about are starting to disappear around him, and he can’t understand why. 

His performance is particularly effective because we can feel Mike changing as the film progresses. His transformation isn’t some dramatic coming-of-age revelation, but a gradual, slow process of understanding himself through pain. The loss of his mother and the absence of his brother force him to confront the feelings he might otherwise have kept buried. It’s heartbreaking to watch someone so young try to make sense of a world that seems determined to take things away from him, but there’s also something beautiful about the person he becomes in the process. 

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Moss-Bachrach makes for an equally compelling presence as Lester, a cold, reserved father whose stoicism seems inseparable from his resentment toward his wife’s unhappiness. A victim complex lurks beneath his anger, a sense that he has done everything expected of him and is still somehow being punished for it. Though Lester and Louise don’t share much screen time, their scenes together have an incredible tension. You can feel the pain and frustration of a relationship that has deteriorated behind a facade the couple maintains for their children. Balfe is also fantastic in her comparatively brief appearance as Louise, bringing a sadness to a woman whose isolation has become almost unbearable. 

It’s here that Haigh’s attention to setting becomes especially important. I think filmmakers rarely consider setting and landscape as thoughtfully as he does. The Colorado mountains, beautifully captured in the Canadian locations where the film was shot, become like another character. The sweeping, snow-covered landscapes contrast the film’s intimate family drama, giving the story an expansive quality despite its relatively small cast and confined emotional world. But the beauty of the scenery also pairs with an intense hostility. There is nowhere to hide from the cold, and the isolation that Louise feels becomes something we experience through the cinematography. By the time she disappears, you begin to understand how a life spent in such a place might slowly drive someone mad. 

The sound design is just as essential to the film’s atmosphere. A droning, minimalist score blends with the sounds of the environment: boots crunching through snow, the wind moving across the mountains, dogs barking somewhere in the distance. Haigh understands that sometimes the most effective moments in a film don’t need music to tell us how to feel. Mike’s repeated journey through the snow in search of his mother gradually takes on an almost meditative quality. The crunch of his boots becomes like breathing, an action he repeats because he has no other way to process what has happened to him. The repetition becomes its own form of survival and structures the film in such an interesting way. 

There are plenty of familiar Haigh touchstones here: emotionally absent parents who feel more like ghosts than guardians, alcohol addiction, repressed feelings, and coming to terms with one’s sexuality. But Mike’s queerness is never treated as the singular defining conflict of his story. Instead, his connection with Jimmy (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) emerges alongside the most painful experience of his life. Jimmy enters Mike’s world as the life he has always known falls apart, offering a relationship that doesn’t demand the same emotional repression he has learned to accept from his father. 

Whether their connection is a friendship, a crush, or something more doesn’t feel like the point. What matters is the tenderness of watching Mike begin to let his guard down. He starts to recognize that the sensitivity he has carried with him isn’t something to be ashamed of, and that there might be other ways to live than the one his father has modeled for him. Haigh never hits us over the head with this. It’s something we discover alongside Mike, in small gestures and unspoken feelings that make his relationship with Jimmy feel so real. Sometimes finding light in the darkness is as simple as realizing you don’t have to remain the person your circumstances have taught you to be. 

There’s a line in the film about how “folks always find a way to cope.” It’s a deceptively simple sentiment for a story so consumed by grief, but it gets at what makes A Long Winter work. Coping doesn’t necessarily mean healing, and moving forward doesn’t mean returning to the person you were before something terrible happened. Sometimes survival requires becoming someone new. 

It’s difficult to follow a film as emotionally profound as All of Us Strangers, with its enormous feelings and haunting imagery, but I find Haigh’s decision to pull back into something quieter and colder genuinely compelling. A Long Winter is stylistically closer to the understated intimacy of Weekend (2011), even as it continues to explore the same questions about love, loneliness, and identity that have defined his more expansive work. It doesn’t always reach the emotional heights of his best films, but its restraint is part of what makes it so effective. This is a story that understands grief doesn’t always arrive with a grand revelation. Sometimes it looks like putting one foot in front of the other, walking through the snow, and hoping that eventually the world will feel a little less cold. 

Review Courtesy of Jake Fittipaldi

Feature Image Credit to MUBI