Nonton film The Snowman (2017) full movie subtitle Indonesia

Review Movie Film The Snowman (2017)

There are a couple of mysteries swirling through “The Snowman,” a leaden, clotted, exasperating mess. This ostensible whodunit involves a serial killer who’s preying on women, leaving behind carefully arranged body parts and a childlike snowman as a kind of elaborate signature. The greater puzzle, though, is how an enterprise studded with so much talent — starting with the director Tomas Alfredson (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”) and including the star Michael Fassbender — has led to such a grim, thrill-free thriller, one without a twitch of real feeling and next to no elementary story sense.

Mr. Fassbender plays Harry Hole, a dissipated, alcoholic detective living in Oslo, which presumably means he’s Norwegian even if he (and most everyone else) speaks in English. With his red-rimmed eyes and a cigarette drooping from his lips, Harry comes across as one of those classically shabby gumshoe types, the existential inside-outsider who chafes against the rules even as he saves the day. He has an ex (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a new colleague (Rebecca Ferguson), and soon he has a mess of trouble that he navigates amid a great deal of snow, byzantine developments, dead-end detours and a grab bag of random characters. (Val Kilmer, Chloë Sevigny and Toby Jones all breeze by.)

The problem isn’t the narrative complications, even if the movie soon becomes mired in them. Raymond Chandler tied his novel “The Big Sleep” into so many knots that apparently he couldn’t tell who killed one of its characters. As Leigh Brackett, who helped turn the novel into the 1946 film, said, “When you read it from page to page it moves so beautifully that you don’t care.” The problem, Brackett said, was “if you start tearing it apart to see what makes it tick, it comes unglued.” The trick was to hold on to Chandler’s language and go with his flow, mood and milieu, letting — as the film’s director, Howard Hawks, said later — the characters “handle the plot, rather than let the plot move them.”

Certainly “The Snowman” might have been better if someone at some point had learned from Hawks (always a good idea) and let the characters handle the plot. That might have helped, at least a little. The movie is based on a novel by the popular Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo, whose intricately involved, atmospheric tales are far more complex — they have politics, themes and worldviews — than anything in this movie. Shot to shot, Mr. Alfredson and his estimable team give you plenty to look at, including acres of blinding white snow, noirish nights, desaturated pooling red, a sleekly generic Euro-scape and Mr. Fassbender’s expressionless mug. Yet there’s no glue — not a whiff of life or a single substantial, grounding directorial idea — that makes this pottage work scene to scene.