The Weirdly Good “The Frozen Ground”
Bad art and unintentional synthesis
I'd had the Nicolas Cage and John Cusack crime drama The Frozen Ground (2013) in my Netflix queue forever, but only recently was I bored and bereft enough of things to watch as I fell asleep to give it a chance. Most movies that end up on Netflix aren’t good—you start them and lose interest after ten minutes, because most of them are things that you almost want to see, but don’t really want to see. But to my surprise I watched this one the whole way through.
Everyone knows that Cage, who has debts coming out of his ass, will do just about any project that offers him a paycheck, so it's no surprise that he brings his usual workmanlike presence to this movie. Outside of a few odd rejuvenated bits of inspired mania every few years, like in Mandy (2018) and a few other high notes, “getting a paycheck mode” is all that he has left in him. But with this movie, it weirdly kind of works.
It's about real life serial killer Robert Hansen, who killed 17 women in Alaska in the 1970s. He is perhaps one of the least known, most prolific serial killers in American history. John Cusack plays Hansen as a workmanlike serial killer, carrying out his compulsions like mandatory tasks, and not really enjoying any of it. We get no idea of why he does what he does. The movie is almost entirely devoid of psychological insight. This is probably a deliberate choice, but even if they had wanted to have a real psychological thriller with insight, the kind they used to make easily in the 90s, I don’t think filmmakers even know how to do that anymore.
But this total lack of psychological reflection also kind of works for this movie, just like Cage’s paycheck-oriented performance does. Everything is as workmanlike as it can possibly be, on every level—story, aesthetics, design, performances. Cusack, known for romantic comedies and being the good guy, just seems glad to have the chance to be playing a bad guy, and so doesn't really make an effort to understand who Hansen is, beyond a guy who mechanically goes about his grim duty.
Beyond the two (former) A-list leads, the rest of the cast is far stronger than it has any right to be. Breaking Bad's Dean Norris and classic That Guy Kevin Dunn play cops who help Cage track down the killer. Radha Mitchell plays his wife, and Vanessa Hudgens plays the young prostitute who got away from Hansen and eventually helps to bring him down.
The plot is mainly about Cage's quest to get enough evidence to convince the District Attorney, played by yet another classic That Guy Kurt Fuller, to give him a search warrant for Hansen's house, since Cage is convinced he is the killer. It's all about paperwork, navigating bureaucratic processes, and keeping your own suspicions and agendas concealed in favor of going by the book.
Which is all to say that The Frozen Ground is among the most boring serial killer movies ever made. Despite the boring theme and style, it is an extremely dialectical movie. The workmanlike attitude of the actors in the movie toward the film itself, the plot of navigating the labyrinths of bureaucracy, and the begrudging nature of the killings themselves all sync up. Rarely do you find such a synchronicity between the motivations of the hero and the villain, not to mention the actual actors playing them, and the real life story itself. It all comes together in a way that is so perfect it could only be unintentional. I sort of loved it.
