When Centigrade opens, married couple Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez) and Matt (Vincent Piazza) are already trapped in their car under a mound of snow, unable to escape. Director and co-writer Brendan Walsh doesn’t waste any time on set-up or backstory, establishing the basic details about the couple’s situation in brief title cards: It’s 2002, and Naomi and Matt are traveling through Norway on a signing tour to promote Naomi’s book. While those title cards also claim that the movie is based on a true story, it’s really a composite of various similar real events.
That allows for Walsh to take more fictional liberties, but it also loses some of the grounding in reality, and Walsh doesn’t seem interested in fleshing out his characters beyond those initial facts. Naomi and Matt wake up to discover that during the night, as they slept in their car on the side of the road (because they were afraid to drive in inclement weather), a blizzard has completely buried them. They can’t open the doors or windows, the car won’t start, they have limited food reserves, and Naomi’s cell phone only has half its battery life left.
They start bickering almost immediately after they realize the danger of the situation they’re in, with Naomi eager to break a window and attempt to dig out, while Matt insists that they stay put and wait for rescue. The characters make a series of dubious decisions that keep them in the car indefinitely, as days pass by with increasingly little hope of survival. It’s easy for audiences to second-guess characters in such dire circumstances, but Walsh has trouble getting viewers these characters' side, even after a cheap reveal that Naomi is heavily pregnant.
That raises the stakes, but it also invites further questions of plausibility, which only increase as the movie goes on. If the characters are going to spend most of the movie just passively accepting their fate, then there needs to be more to their personalities to keep the audience invested, but Naomi and Matt only reveal a handful of additional details about their lives beyond what’s established at the outset. We never learn what Naomi’s book is about, or what Matt does for a living, or how they met, or how long they’ve been together. Whether they’re bitterly arguing or reaffirming their love for each other, it’s hard to feel emotionally invested in such an ill-defined relationship. The movie spends nearly 90 minutes stuck in a car with these people but never really gets to know them.
There’s inherent tension in the situation, and it escalates as the food supplies dwindle and the potential avenues for survival start to seem more remote. Walsh evokes movies like J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost or Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours in his stark depiction of characters overwhelmed by nature’s indifference. But the best of those movies are fascinating in part because they feature characters constantly working on new solutions to their problems, or because the characters look back on the lives that led them to their particular circumstances. There are no flashbacks in Centigrade, and Naomi and Matt never come up with any ingenious ways to stay alive. When Naomi suddenly gets a brief signal on her phone, she uses it to call… her dad in the United States.
Things get even more frustrating thanks to that pregnancy reveal, which takes the most obvious dramatic route, even if it strains believability beyond the breaking point. Rodriguez and Piazza keep the story grounded, never giving in to melodrama even during the most heightened emotional moments, and their performances may be the only thing keeping viewers on the characters’ sides. Walsh also keeps things visually interesting, given that practically the entire movie, aside from a handful of periodic exterior shots, takes place inside the car. He regularly finds different ways to approach the same space, creating evocative images like framing just a fragment of Matt’s face in the rearview mirror as he’s speaking.
Those occasional visual flourishes aren’t enough to get past the narrative inertia, though, and the movie feels longer than its lean 90 minutes, especially as it drags toward its seemingly inevitable conclusion. Despite some brief moments of revulsion at the lengths the characters go to in order to stay alive, Centigrade isn’t really a horror movie, and it shies away from any truly gruesome potential consequences of the situation, but it’s too slow and flat to work as engaging drama. A random bear attack or a turn toward cannibalism would have at least livened things up a bit. Instead the movie is the equivalent of being stuck on a long trip with an annoying couple who won’t stop arguing.
Starring Genesis Rodriguez and Vincent Piazza, Centigrade opens Friday, Aug. 28 in select theaters and on VOD.