‘Dead of Winter’ is an outstanding thriller with shades of ‘Fargo’, showcasing Emma Thompson in a strikingly different kind of role. She plays a widowed woman in snowbound northern Minnesota who travels to a remote lake to scatter her husband’s ashes, only to stumble upon a kidnapping. Suddenly, she must summon all the resourcefulness we might usually expect from a Liam Neeson character to try to rescue a young girl no one else even realises is missing.

The setup recalls Kurt Russell’s ‘Breakdown’ from the late ’90s – an ordinary individual forced into a life-or-death struggle after a disappearance – and also the British classic ‘Seance on a Wet Afternoon’ from 1964, with its unsettling portrait of a husband enabling his mentally unstable wife’s criminal plans out of love and loyalty. Here, too, the kidnappers are a married couple driven by disturbing motives tied to medical treatment.

Thompson’s character has little dialogue for much of the film, yet her determination is always clear. Her resilience feels rooted in family values of never giving up and never staying still – qualities she uses to outwit her captors. There are flashbacks, with Thompson’s younger self played by her real-life daughter. At times these scenes feel heavy-handed, pulling away from the immediacy of the present, but the very final sequence brings past, present, and even future threads together in an unexpected way.

The climax leaves us with three women – the kidnapper, the kidnapped, and the rescuer – each relying on instinct and willpower in the icy wilderness. It’s refreshing, too, to see a woman in her sixties leading such a role, offering a demographic rarely represented in mainstream thrillers. Thompson plays a character with little left to lose: she’s there to scatter her husband’s ashes, but in saving another life she also preserves his memory, binding grief and purpose into one.

Tender and moving yet relentless in its suspense, ‘Dead of Winter’ is one of the year’s best thrillers. You feel the subzero chill in every frame, but it’s Thompson’s performance – resilient, bruised, and fiercely human – that lingers long after the credits roll.