Film review: Død snø [Dead Snow] (2009), directed by Tommy Wirkola

A group of med students travel up to a remote cabin in the mountains to spend their Easter holiday together. It’s all fun and games until a man shows up telling them about the local folklore: about how the Nazis in the area were raiding the locals, stealing their valuables and torturing them. Eventually, they were thought to have frozen to death. Re-emerging in the present day as zombies, I suppose it’s true, of sorts.

I can’t say I know any of the actors (Vegar Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner, Lasse Valdal, Evy Kasseth Røsten, Jeppe Laursen, Jenny Skavlan, Ane Dahl Torp), not having watched a lot of Norwegian things even when I still lived back home in Sweden, but they put on a good show.

If you like blood, blood on snow, zombies, Nazis as baddies, carnage and mayhem, you’re in for a treat. If you’re not into zombie films or graphic scenes of excessive gore, perhaps this is not the film for you. I really enjoyed the dark humour, though, even though the film’s bloodlust left me with a queasy feeling when the movie had finished. Perhaps not my kind of film.

In a way, it’s reminiscent of Severance, except Severance didn’t have Nazi zombies, it had murderous eastern Europeans, and a group of weapon’s company office employees instead of med students. Severance was also a lot funnier, having a lot more comedic lines. As a horror comedy, Dead Snow could’ve been funnier.

As a zombie flick, it was pretty good. I think. I’m not exactly an expert in the field, although I suppose I’ll have to practice – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in pre-production, apparently, and that would be a must-see.