TIFF 51: “A Long Winter” leads Andrew Haigh up the Rocky Mountains
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 8:00PM 
The human figure against the grandeur of the natural world has obsessed visual artists for centuries, if not millennia. In A Long Winter, his latest film and follow-up to the highly popular All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh follows the footsteps of those that came before him and delivers what can only be described as an exercise in landscape cinema. It’s perhaps his work where shot composition and the blocking of actors have most to say. At the same time, the text barely raises its voice above a whisper, whether it is to flesh out character or spell out theme, to engage or entrance or alienate the viewer sitting before the coldness of a big screen overcome by frost.
Depending on the sort of film lover you are, this will either make A Long Winter a slog as hard to go through as the unforgiveness of its titular season, or it’ll have you breathe a sigh of relief that the Andrew Haigh of Lean On Pete has, at last, made his return after nearly a decade in absentia…
Transporting Colm Tóibí’ns Pyrenees-set novel to midcentury Colorado, Haigh tells the story of Mike, a young man of a certain meekness. He loves his mother above all, and she seems to return that unconditional affection. So, he’s a mamma’s boy, through and through. However, this coddled boy on the cusp of becoming a man in a harsh world also appears only to see her surface, blinded by her projections and unable to glimpse deeper into her interiority, her secret unhappiness. They live up in the Rocky Mountains, along with a patriarch who does little to help turn his spouse’s sorrow into something more tolerable, and Mike’s strapping brother, Tommy.
As it happens, Tommy is about to leave the family home and the mountain’s isolation. Perhaps that will be a relief for our protagonist, though it’ll also be a loss of comfort and one more reminder of just how alone they are when the winter inevitably comes and communication with the nearest town becomes even harder than it already is under the blessings of a summer sun. Then again, it might be a relief because the tension in their shared room is something to behold, as if Haigh showed Fred Hechinger and Kit Connor that famous East of Eden screen test with Paul Newman and James Dean, instructing them to strive for the same brand of “brotherly” love.
But Mike’s eyes don’t just wander to his brother’s bed to see the man whose blood he shares or some fantasy of a policeman looking back, moving his hand downward, pulling down the zipper of his fly with an implied invitation. They also wander whenever they can cross the distance and visit the town where a soldier might be spied upon in the corner, dashing and inviting. He also follows his mother, because of course he does, and, though Mike obeys her instructions to stay outside while she shops, the young man still spies her through the window. Instead of buying oil or fuel for their rural needs, she’s getting her special wine that, according to the boy’s dad, is closer to acid than booze.
As played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, this Lester is a man of offhand cruelties and a callousness that hides from criticism by calling itself pragmatism. His words sting when they don’t punch or land a slap across your face without him having to raise a hand. It’s violent language that, even when said without intent to hurt, can’t help but produce harm, whether it’s his wife’s obvious, alcohol-fueled implosion or how Mike shrinks into himself whenever they’re together in the forced communion of a family meal. At dinner, when, not moving a muscle, Hechinger appears to cringe and cower, either from an animal instinct or hard-learned caution.
Caitriona Balfe is the opposite of them as Louise, housewife and mother. Though every cast member sometimes seems as if they have chosen a random regional accent for theircharacters, hers is the most disruptive in how unconvincing it is. And yet, it works, for this is a woman inventing herself 24/7 who still can't put on a happy face that will convince anyone with enough brain cells to put two and two together. There’s nothing offhanded about how she plays a woman dying on the inside, which makes Mike’s early ignorance of her misery so striking. It’s easy to go through life not knowing the people we claim to love most. Then again, he might just have been too dazzled to notice.
Because she is dazzling, as if performing herself, especially when a melancholic mood takes hold of her. Cigarette in hand to better punctuate some bit of misty-eyed reminiscence, there’s a self-consciousness to her schtick that could imply a curation of the self. Yearning to leave the Rocky Mountains, this 1950s housewife amuses herself by playing the drama of her own existence as one of those leading ladies in the women’s pictures that Hollywood still produced at the time, those who exploded in complexity and melodramatic excess. They were larger than life, realer than real, a truth you could see reflected at you through the haze of aspirational glamour.
But there’s nothing aspirational about Louise’s lot in life. Not from her perspective. And Mike is just starting to see that – or perhaps it’s Haigh’s camera gleaning more insight from what it observes than its aligning character’s subjectivity – when, one day, he comes home to the aftermath of what must have been a mighty spousal dispute. Only broken pieces remain, ghosts of a scene we don’t get to witness. It’s as when he showed the brothers comforting a rabbit before killing the animal, eliding the act itself in a cut, having film form abstract physical violence to better grasp at emotional brutality. Well, the rabbit was routine. This is not. So, later, as the seasons change and the promise of loneliness that winter brings becomes too much to bear, Louise leaves.
More accurately, she disappears into the landscape and, as the conditions grow harsher, nobody can find a lonely woman who most certainly perished somewhere out there in the cold. Locals talk about waiting for spring, for the thawing of snow, when the vultures shall reveal her whereabouts. Mike will not wait. So he wanders daily through the ever-whitening slopes, as if the world is being erased by perpetual snowfall and he’s willing to erase himself with it. Inside the home, domesticity unravels between the two men. A third joins them, a mixed-race boy from town who does the domestic labor needed to keep the whole house fed and functioning.
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Jimmy, and his beauty doesn’t go unnoticed by the protagonist. Whether it’s mutual is hard to discern, though the patriarch can see, clear as day, the gendered expectations neither young man meets, feminizing them in speech and looking down on them even as his own world keeps falling apart before the hope for a restart once spring thaws the land. And in this unstable state of affairs, Haigh reveals his mastery of mise-en-scène which, in A Long Winter, is perhaps more strongly felt than his gifts with character drama. A reflection of the coldness contained within the story? Perhaps.
Whatever the reason behind these directorial choices, A Long Winter is rigorously assembled to a degree that deserves admiration t even from those the film fails to engage otherwise. Haigh’s control of shot scale has rarely been more evident, transforming the relationship between man and mountain throughout. At first, there’s the illusion of balance, with neither element dominating the image. However, it’s noticeable how fragile Hechinger looks, small amid something much vaster than himself. Later, when nature takes the mother and refuses to return her, Mike isn’t merely small in the frame.
He is crushed by the snowy grandeur that seems ready to devour this little thing that moves through its vastness. That this isn’t how it remains until the weather warms is a small miracle of character development, first articulated in these formal terms. Before Mike expresses that he wishes the winter with Jimmy would last forever, we already feel a change in how he relates to the season’s merciless might. No longer a speck about to be swallowed whole by the snow, he’s framed as the adventurer of Romantic painting, while the Colorado wilderness starts to resemble a work by Caspar David Friedrich. Andrew Haigh and cinematographer André Turpin work miracles.
Their lensing of indoor scenes is even more impressive, as it comes without the benefit of postcard-worthy subjects. The deterioration of familial bonds is verbalized plenty by the belligerent patriarch, whose affable affect makes his lack of affection all the more lacerating. But it’s better understood on the son’s side through Haigh’s blocking, slowly turning a home into a powder keg or perhaps a chamber slowly filling up with suffocating gas. It’s subtle work, the kind that doesn’t call attention to itself, in line with the quietly exquisite period stylings of Emmanuel Frechette’s sets and Carol Case’s costumes.
In their restraint, such pieces of moviemaking artifice can feel as real as the land itself. And all those formal elements, up to the shattering cry of a dying bird of prey, are the methods through which Haigh brings this odd coming-of-age tale to the screen. Resolutions aren’t the ones you’d expect, catharsis is left off-screen, and much else remains unresolved for the spectator to ponder on their way out of the theater. However, the camera shows us a transforming relationship between a young man and his place in the world, the self and the material surroundings, grounding him and, hopefully, the viewers who’ve surrendered themselves over to A Long Winter.
Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter is part of TIFF’s Special Presentations. It will later play at other festivals like those in New York and Calgary. MUBI has distribution rights for the American market.
Reader Comments (2)
I'm really looking forward to this, and the buzz feels very quiet... I hope they're patient with the release, and it doesn't get lost in the fall/winter Oscar movie flood.
Really not into Haigh, who I consider overrated.
Totally into Hechinger, and old crush and very interesting young actor.