The Art of Editing and The Snowman

[00:00] because I couldn’t think of anything in specific and that’s what I do when I script. I just, if I hit a point where I’m not quite sure what to do I try to just write a sentence or two outside of the voice of the script literally describing what needs to happen

[00:16] to join where the script is at to the point that’s following it. It’s a very utilitarian method, but it helps me get around writer’s block and minimize problems where different ideas will make unstated logical leaps in between.

[00:31] Then the longer I stared at it the more absurd it became, because, you know, it’s the cold open to The Art of Editing and The Snowman, and it just sat there, taunting me, practically begging for a joke or some setup for a pun that would make Joel Schumacher cringe in his seat,

[00:47] and now after building it up, really hyping the hell out of this idea, just like The Snowman I’m now going to drop this entire bit and never reference it again. [theme music]

[01:05] The Snowman is a 2017 film, directed by Tomas Alfredson, based on the Scandinavian-Noir novel of the same name written by Jo Nesbo. The film stars Michael Fassbender as down-on-his-luck alcoholic detective Harry Hole as he unravels

[01:19] the identity of a serial killer who abducts and dismembers women, This film has gained substantial notoriety for being, uh, a complete forking mess.

[01:33] In an interview with the Norwegian national broadcaster, the NRK, Alfredson suggested that due to the rushed shooting schedule of thirty days and limited access to locations

[01:45] as much as 10 to 15 percent of the script hadn’t actually been filmed, leaving huge gaps in the story that needed to be either bridged or restructured in editing. I would suggest that things are even more dire than that makes it sound.

[02:00] Failing to shoot fifteen percent of the film is going to leave literal plot holes so large that the only solution is to excise the plot lines entirely, The end result is delirious.

[02:16] “She said she was going to visit a friend, but she never came back.” “Why did you come to me, I’ve been suspended.” I’m going to admit I’m excited and nervous because this one is such a mess

[02:30] that I’m still not sure I entirely have a handle on the film. There’s always another detail that goes nowhere, another plot thread that disappears,

[02:42] another scene that connects to events that were never shown. As we get into this I want to re-state the same thing that I did with Suicide Squad.

[02:54] When people say a movie has bad editing they’re going to be talking mainly about two different kinds of editing: shot to shot, and scene to scene, or momentary editing and structural editing.

[03:06] Momentary editing is the nitty gritty editing: what kinds of cuts are used, where are they placed, how far apart are they spaced, how well is continuity preserved, does a match edit actually work, does intercut dialogue feel right, can we follow the action properly,

[03:22] Structural editing is the bigger picture: what order are scenes in, how is the movie as a whole paced, when are flashbacks inserted, are locations and geography properly established,

[03:35] are foreshadowing and callbacks properly implemented, and all of that. The Snowman, like Suicide Squad, is littered with both problems. how we’re going about the discussion here.

[03:50] We’re talking about the art of editing, but not exclusively. In a lot of ways editing is simply the vector that we’re using to discuss other elements of the filmmaking, or more specifically we’re addressing other elements of the filmmaking

[04:04] because of how they end up manifesting in the edit. For example, early in the film is a scene where Harry shows up at work and his superior officer, Gunnar Hagan, gives him a whole “clean up your act, I can’t keep covering for you”

[04:18] Stripped to an absolute bare-bones factual description the scene is fine. The dialogue is fine, the acting is fine, the pace of the cuts, the flow from close up

[04:30] to insert to medium, the use of split edits, it’s all fine. For some reason almost every single shot in the scene is blocked with a lateral slide,

[04:44] Harry’s shots moving from right to left, Gunnar’s moving from left to right. but consideration wasn’t taken for how these shots would then cut together, and the edit doesn’t consider the change in motion vector from one shot

[05:00] to the other, resulting in a scene that feels like it’s bouncing back and forth And then spice it up with this jarring edit. The conventional editing style, which is generally used throughout the film, is to preserve lines

[05:15] of motion from one shot to the next, while using neutral moments as a visual buffer to This is conventional continuity editing, which is the continuity of action, subject, and motion,

[05:29] with slight discontinuity used to build tension in what is meant to be an energetic, Going back to the cafeteria example, there’s no motivation for this movement.

[05:41] It’s two characters having a low key conversation in hushed tones. Maybe using this motion on a couple key bits of dialogue could add some interest to the scene, or if Harry’s shot had some slight motion while Gunnar’s was more static it

[05:57] would be conveying emotional state, but simply having the motion mirrored across every single shot for an entire minute of dialogue, it’s just dizzying for no purpose.

[06:10] Again, while these issues are going to intersect several different elements of filmmaking, from the camera work to the script, filmmaking is symbiotic to the degree that flaws or failures in one area will impact the ability for others to do their jobs.

[06:25] So while we will be talking about a whole host of issues we will be approaching Before we go further we should probably address the name issue, and people who are familiar

[06:37] with the source material already know where I’m going with this. I’ve already said the main character’s name is Harry Hole, and that’s not entirely accurate, but it is accurate to this film.

[06:50] In Norweigian the character’s name would be pronounced closer to Har-rey Hoo-le, [Mispronouncing name] Har-rey Hoolah, Har-ey Houluh, Hooula... which if you were to translate to English would be Harry Hill, but the filmmakers opted

[07:07] not to keep the proper Norwegian pronunciation, nor to translate the name, but instead to just anglicize it to Harry Hole. “Mister Hole?”

[07:21] “Ah, the great Harry Hole.” I don’t have a point here, but it is very funny. In the film’s prologue, a woman and her son are visited by a police officer named Jonas.

[07:34] The boy believes that the abusive man is his uncle, but discovers that he is, in fact, his father after he sees Jonas and his mother having sex. The woman threatens to tell Jonas’ wife about their son, to which Jonas threatens

[07:47] The woman and her son follow, but the woman slips into a catatonic haze, drifts off the leaving the boy to stand and watch as his mother and the car sink into the lake.

[08:04] The Snowman centers around alcoholic detective Harry Hole as he tries to fix both his professional and personal lives by focusing on work instead of drinking. He has a rocky but caring relationship with his ex girlfriend Rakel and her son Oleg,

[08:18] Harry falls into the snowman case when he meets Katrine Bratt, a junior detective just Katrine is already pursuing the snowman killer for personal reasons as she suspects her father,

[08:34] detective Gert Rafto, was murdered by the killer nine years earlier while he was investigating a string of murders in Bergen, though she keeps this connection a secret from her coworkers. While investigating the disappearance of Birte Becker Harry lifts the cold case files from Katrine’s bag.

[08:51] Katrine suspects that a recent series of missing persons’ reports might be connected to the old case, and though Harry is initially dismissive of the theory he comes around after reading the case files that night, and the two discuss the possible connections over breakfast

[09:04] A few days later a similar missing person is reported with the caller When Harry and Katrine respond to the call they find the missing person, Sylvia Otterson,

[09:16] However shortly after leaving a second call is placed, and returning to the Otterson farm Sylvia’s decapitated body is found in the chicken coop, with her head being found propped With a confirmed murder Harry is given clearance to set up a special task force to clear the

[09:35] murders quickly in order to avoid negative international press that might hurt Oslo’s bid for the non-International-Olympic-Comittee-trademark-infringing generic Winter Games. Katrine suspects the killer is slimeball industrialist Arve Støp, who had an affair with the original

[09:51] murder victim nine years earlier, or if not him then Stop’s friend, Doctor Idar Vetlesen, who has some connection to several of the victims via the reproductive services clinic Harry discovers Katrine’s personal stake in the case when he travels to Bergen to follow up

[10:07] on clues Bergen detectives failed to investigate during the earlier case, While he is away Katrine intercepts a notification that Birte Becker’s phone has been reactivated,

[10:19] with the GPS indicating it’s in the home of Doctor Vetlesen. Ignoring regulations and possibly seeking revenge Katrine breaks into Vetlesen’s home where she finds his body in the garage, decapitated via shotgun.

[10:32] Katrine is suspended, but investigation of Vetlesen’s home uncovers the dismembered remains of Birte Becker and a victim otherwise dropped from the movie named Ms. Dahl. “Birta Becker and Ms. Dahl.”

[10:45] Actually, on my seventh viewing of the movie I did catch one earlier reference to Ms. Dahl, from when Katrine drops Harry off after they start investigating Birta Becker’s disappearance. Look, this is Hilga Dahl.

[10:58] Missing two weeks, similar age, two children, unhappy marriage.” On one hand it was established earlier in the movie, on the other hand they never actually investigate that disappearance, and the reference goes by incredibly quickly

[11:11] “Look this is Hilga Dahl.” While the Oslo police rule Vetlesen’s death a suicide Harry suspects it has been staged, as it is nearly identical to the staging of Rafto’s body, and also, you know, incredibly suspicious.

[11:29] Katrine, convinced that Støp must be the killer, attempts to seduce him at a fundraiser. He gives her a key to his hotel suite and tells her to wait for him there. She goes to the room and sets up surveillance in the form of the most conspicuous spy device possible,

[11:43] but is intercepted, kidnapped, and killed by the real killer before Støp even arrives. The following morning Harry finds Katrine’s body sitting in her car outside his apartment, her finger having been severed so the killer can use her fingerprint to access her computer.

[11:59] together the identity of the killer, Rakel’s boyfriend Mathias, a plastic surgeon who also substituted at Vetlesen’s clinic, and has been killing women who have been unfaithful

[12:12] to their partners and had abortions as surrogate revenge aginst his mother who, by his logic, At the moment that Harry has put it all together, Mathias has kidnapped Rakel and Oleg

[12:25] Harry confronts Mathias at the cabin, saving Rakel and Oleg, but losing a finger in the scuffle. Harry then pursues Mathias out into the woods, onto the frozen lake. Mathias shoots Harry

[12:38] but before he is able to finish Harry off, Mathias steps on a patch In the epilogue Harry is back at work with a new prosthetic finger.

[12:50] “I’ll take it.” [somber piano music] There is zero wrap up.

[13:05] That’s, it just ends. So, I don’t know if that montage does justice to just how Writing a summary is actually a challenge because, like, I need the words I’m saying

[13:23] to make sense, but I worry that in doing so I’ve fixed problems with the film by omitting Like, I skipped describing the scenes with the fumigator that Harry keeps running into

[13:38] because I don’t know how to describe what these scenes are doing, There’s a not-insubstantial amount of screen time given to a woman who I presume is a sex-trafficing

[13:53] victim that Vetleson has aquired on behalf of Støp, and this is, I guess, a red herring to implicate either of those characters as the possible murderer, but she also just stops showing up at a certain point with no explanation, or conclusion.

[14:08] The inexplicable editing of the film begins pretty much right out the gate. Like, the issues here are absolutely not limited to just characters that disappear out of the story or motives and timelines that don’t make any sense.

[14:22] The cutting of the opening moments, as Jonas arrives at the cabin, is extremely over-tuned, which is to say that the shots being in the order that they are in is fine,

[14:35] but the temporal relationship between the edits is too abrupt. Just to be clear, this is on the magnitude of a number of frames with each shot.

[14:47] To isolate one cut in specific that might make this easier to understand, Mathias’ mother puts on a sweater and moves to leave the room, and in the next shot is on the stairs The shot selection and screen direction are fine, but the temporal gap between the shots

[15:05] The first shot ends a few frames too soon, and the second shot begins a few frames too late, making the cut feel wrong, like she’s teleported, and that same problem happens

[15:19] with every single shot for almost two straight minutes at the start of the movie. It makes for an intro that is disjointed and rushed in a way that strikes me as very odd for a film that already has a problem with not having enough footage.

[15:35] The introduction is so important to setting audience expectations that I don’t feel like I really need to explain why it’s a bad idea for your film to start off with a

[15:48] series of cuts that are so needlessly jarring that they look like mistakes. The one half-theory that I have is that it was originally cut to music or a title sequence

[16:00] that was later dropped, that there was some other creative element that dictated the pacing The only evidence I have to support this, though, is my own intuition

[16:13] At the end of the prologue Mathias’ mother sinks into the water, then the camera tilts up and holds on this shot for pretty much exactly long enough that you would expect

[16:27] It’s a nice, moody static shot with lots of white space. Beat, beat, cut to Harry’s vodka bottle. It doesn’t just look like it was edited for the main title,

[16:43] Instead the film cuts from this to a black frame where the studio credits play, one after another, flat font, for 22 seconds before cutting to Harry’s vodka bottle for Fassbender’s

[17:00] I’m just guessing here, this is pure speculation, but this white text on a black screen looks like a temp placeholder that someone threw in just to make sure it didn’t get forgotten,

[17:13] and then no one could agree on where these should actually go, and then the production ran out of time and money and they just never got replaced. But, okay, so even if that’s the reason for why the intro is cut the way that it is,

[17:27] it doesn’t even start to explain the baffling creative decisions in the next major scene, when Harry returns to his apartment and finds a fumigator spraying for mold, a scene where, across a series of jump cuts, Harry shoots at the man, who doesn’t seem to notice,

[17:42] and remains unbothered by the fact that a stranger is pointing a gun at him. Harry then just… stands there. There is, there’s no intelligible cause and effect here, just a series of loosely

[17:56] connected shots, and this will be the pace for the rest of the movie. ADR is automated dialogue replacement, sometimes also referred to as dubbing, looping, or post-sync.

[18:11] These are processes where an actor’s on-set vocal performance is replaced in post-production with audio from a studio performance, possibly by a different actor. I touched on this a bit in my video on The Legend of Chun Li

[18:25] “The dialogue in the film has overwhelmingly been redubbed, which is actually part of why The emotion of the face and lips just doesn’t quite match the sound that you’re hearing.

[18:39] Also there’s a different character to the dialogue that’s recorded in a sound booth It’s subtle, but pervasive.” Now, a thing that I want to stress here is that ADR isn’t inherently bad.

[18:52] Basically every movie has some, or even a lot of ADR. ADR is a problem-solving tool, and it can be very good at solving problems. That said, heavy use of ADR is a sign that there were a lot of problems that needed solving.

[19:11] The elephant in the room here is, of course, Val Kilmer’s performance, in which all of Kilmer’s lines have been replaced. “Can you tell me, what, was your wife seeing anyone?”

[19:25] In 2015 as part of a battle against throat cancer Kilmer underwent a procedure on his trachea that permanently altered his voice, reducing it to little more than a rasp,

[19:37] “I had a, a tumour a couple years ago, and it’s just a, a mystery.” “Yeah, I’m, I’m fully recovered, except for this tongue, so I sound a bit like

[19:53] Sly Stallone on Quaaludes.” During his performance in The Snowman it is clearly, visibly difficult for him to speak, which makes the difference between the facial performance and the sound of the ADR so harsh.

[20:09] “I need some information on a patient, Layla Orson?” Additionally attempts are made to mask the issue by finding ways to avoid having Val Kilmer speak on screen, and unfortunately they do this - they start this the first time

[20:25] - in just the worst, most obvious way possible. “She said she was going to visit a friend, and she never came back.” I’ve been suspended.”

[20:38] Now, the reason I want to specifically focus on ADR isn’t just because of Val Kilmer’s dialogue. It’s a big part and is instantly noticeable to pretty much everyone, but it’s not the biggest contributor to the deeper problems with the film.

[20:53] The movie is actually plagued with a lot of moments where lines have been added over b-roll or reaction shots in order to construct entirely new interactions. A really obvious example for demonstrating this is in the conversation between Harry

[21:08] The conversation is shot and edited otherwise conventionally, a standard shot-reverse shot with a bias towards the character who is currently speaking. Every line of dialogue is, in whole or in part, on screen.

[21:24] It’s conventional, comfortable, and familiar. It adheres to the standard visual grammar of filmmaking. This makes it all the more jarring when, at the end of the conversation, we get this.

[21:42] “He cried last week.” “Why did you build the snowman facing the house?” Both sides of this exchange, the question and answer, are hidden off-screen.

[22:00] This is an attempt in post-production to fill the gap that explains why Harry knows Josephine didn’t build the snowman, and thus the snowman is suspicious. Not that that actually really matters, because the characters will never directly discuss

[22:15] The way that plot lines have been excised or reorganized results in some truly disorienting stuff, like the whole sequence around Oleg’s birthday present.

[22:27] We first see them at the beginning of the movie when Harry stumbles back to his apartment. We are then given this sequence of events in order.

[22:39] Harry attends Oleg’s hockey game, during which Mathias When asked if they want to get something to eat, Harry and Oleg take the train to the concert, eating ice cream, and talking about Oleg’s

[22:56] Harry and Oleg have a conversation about the father/son school trip that’s coming up, Oleg asks what the surprise is. Jump cut to the two of them walking towards the building, Harry, off camera,

[23:14] explains that someone at work gave him the tickets. [Unusual scream-singing] At the concert Oleg gets a text message saying “urgent message for Harry”, the two of

[23:27] them leave the concert so Harry can make a phone call, and then in a conversation constructed entirely out of off-camera dialogue Katrine tells Harry that a report of another missing woman came in asking for him by name, and they need to go now,

[23:41] Aside from the utter lack of continuity between the close up of the phone and the shot of “can I borrow your phone, I need to make a call”

[23:54] just to re-state what happens here: Katrine sends Oleg, a child she doesn’t know and has never met, a text message for Harry, even though Harry has a phone.

[24:06] Harry gets back in the car with Katrine and, in another bit of ADR, tells her to take him home, [car door shuts]

[24:19] As the cherry on top, in the next shot there’s a minor continuity error as Harry is in his apartment and already has the pills that he just got the prescription for An even simpler example of a scene or transition being constructed out of b-roll

[24:37] Harry and Katrine leave the farm house and then, over a shot of a car driving down the highway, they recieve a call telling them to go back, and decide to turn around, [Caller] “The call came in two minutes ago.

[24:54] [Katrine] “How could-?” And the timeline of these events, as presented, is all over the place.

[25:06] and are thus only a few minutes away, but it’s pitch dark by the time they get back. when it comes to bizarre spatial editing.

[25:20] When the characters first arrive there’s an establishing shot of the property, where there’s this large, prominent cement structure right next to the house, On the second visit, again driving next to the large cement structure, after Sylvia’s

[25:36] twin sister tells them Sylvia is missing, Harry finds Sylvia’s body in the chicken coop, which is, again, right next to the house, then there’s a shot of Harry riding on the back of a snowmobile in the middle of a field, which he jumps off and approaches

[25:51] the big cement structure, which is also right next to the farm house. Where is this? Rafto’s entire sub-plot, told in flashbacks leading up to his murder,

[26:05] It doesn’t actually tell us much about the old murders that would help unravel the new murders, and Rafto himself is a one-note character who doesn’t really do any meaningful investigation.

[26:17] There’s also a really good example of how the standard language of filmmaking can work against the film, because most of the segments showing the audience Rafto’s story are structured, visually, as flashbacks, but they make no sense as flashbacks.

[26:33] Like, okay, what is a flashback in the first place? The standard structure for a flashback is that at an appropriate narrative moment a character has reason to reflect on things that happened in the past,

[26:47] This can be a strong memory trigger, a character actively telling a story to others, or a character getting the information from an external source like a journal.

[27:00] Harry browses through Katrine’s documents, which triggers the flashbacks. He looks at an old magazine and transitions into a private conversation nine years earlier.

[27:14] The problem is that the language of film implies that these are Harry’s memories. The magazine contains no meaningful information on its own, it certainly doesn’t contain this conversation, and the narrative implication is that seeing the magazine

[27:29] But there’s no way that these could be Harry’s memories, and they’re not. These are parallel sequences depicted for the benefit of the audience, but it creates

[27:43] a real problem by implying things that Harry knows, but doesn’t know. what Harry does and doesn’t know, and if the audience is unclear on that, if they can’t

[27:58] follow the protagonist’s train of thought, then the protagonist’s actions start This is pretty much exactly what happens in The Snowman. That’s not even the film’s most baffling use of cinematic language.

[28:13] So much of this film is shot through dirty windows, car windows, tiny windows, or multiple windows, that as a visual metaphor it gets over-saturated to the point it becomes meaningless. It’s one thing to use it sparingly for specific kinds of scenes or for specific characters

[28:29] and moments to imply something emotional about the exchange, the characters’ relationships with each other, or the audience’s relationship to the story, but past a certain point it stops meaning anything on its own and just becomes an extremely noticeable aesthetic choice.

[28:46] I know that comes up a lot in the movies I talk about, but it’s a common problem. hews closer to black comedy.

[29:00] Not outright farce, but definitely a bit absurdist because, well, The idea of a murderer whose calling card is a sinister snowman is inherently silly,

[29:15] but the film plays it 100% straight, resulting in numerous moments in the film where the soundtrack ratchets up the tension while the camera lingers on a frowning snowman.

[29:27] I actually laughed out loud in the theatre when the film pulls a fake-out She leaves her apartment and glances at a regular, three-tier snowman with a carrot nose, before the camera swings around to reveal to the audience that on the back side

[29:42] BWAAAAAH!!! It’s a very, very funny moment, but I’m not sure the movie agrees.

[29:58] So far we’ve mostly been pulling out examples of janky, sloppy scenes that are hard to follow due to poor flow and continuity, but the ultimate casualty of the deep restructuring Now, the standard formula for a mystery is to start with a bunch of possible suspects

[30:15] eliminate possibilities, and build a case. The Snowman involves so many fanciful leaps, such as the killer getting in and out of locked rooms,

[30:27] hauling numerous bodies long distances without notice, meticulously staged murder scenes, and so few meaningful details of psychology or motive, that leading into the climax the only suspects that have really been eliminated are the ones that are dead.

[30:44] Outside of the scene in the diner, the characters don’t really discuss the case. They don’t talk about clues, they don’t argue for or against specific suspects, they rarely talk about motive or opportunity or logistics.

[30:57] Harry assembles a team to work on the case, but they don’t do... anything. They aren’t utilized or consulted, and aside from one baffling moment where one of them tells Harry he can’t have a copy of a crime scene photo

[31:11] they don’t actually interact with the case at all. “Can I keep this?” “Can I keep this?”

[31:27] Clues that are shown to the audience, like cigarette butts and footprints, aren’t even collected. The one scene where the case is actually discussed in meaningful detail, the bit in the diner, is still full of so many seemingly unmotivated responses and disconnected shots that even

[31:44] after repeat viewings it’s difficult to parse what, exactly, the audience is meant to learn from this conversation, and the whole is made all the more baffling by ending on the shot of Harry turning the plate of sausage to reveal he’s cut it apart.

[31:59] It’s a dramatic visual, but is, forgive the pun, disconnected from anything that the characters are actually talking about. The preceding line is like “are you hungry?” which actually makes it look like Harry is

[32:13] taunting her with this action, like the dismembered sausage is supposed to get under her skin? But I don’t know, because why would he do that? The note that Harry first receives is at best an incidental detail that’s discarded

[32:29] It’s also worth mentioning that the note used prominently in the film’s marketing, Mister Police I gave you all the clues, appears nowhere in the movie, though Harry does find a stack of blue stationary in Mathias’ house.

[32:45] There’s a deeper problem here in the film not managing to follow whole events He takes a huge detour to Bergen for extremely unclear reasons, only to discover that Katrine

[32:59] is Rafto’s daughter, but that only sort of explains why she’s fixated on Arve Støp On top of that, Støp’s viability as a suspect is itself tenuous at best.

[33:14] While there’s a reasonable implication that maybe nine years ago Støp killed his mistress to bury an embarrassing news story, and then maybe killed the alcoholic off-duty cop that was investigating that disappearance, there’s no reason to think that Støp has anything

[33:29] to do with the new murders, or even any of the old murders that weren’t his mistress. Nothing is even suggested about how he would fit the serial killer profile or have opportunity to kill virtually any of the victims.

[33:43] To cap it off, Harry then teleports back to Oslo from Bergen. I’m not usually that much of a stickler for movies taking some liberties with travel time, except in this case we already devoted a significant amount of screen time

[33:57] to the fact that travelling from Oslo to Bergen is a substantial trip. Like, in real life the express train between the two cities is six and a half hours. A movie primes the audience’s expectations of itself, and how that manifests here

[34:13] is that there are so many baffling cuts and creative decisions that it’s hard to tell which are deliberate stylistic choices and which are just errors. The movie is so full of inconsistencies in its basic structure that it inadvertently

[34:30] trains the audience to notice inconsistencies that they would probably overlook in a better film. The reveal of Mathias as the killer feels almost plucked out of a hat, with most of the justification being concentrated in the reveal itself.

[34:45] While on one hand it’s incredibly easy to identify Mathias as the killer because he’s the character with a lot of screen time who otherwise has nothing to do, what Roger Ebert called the Law of Economy of Characters,

[34:58] it’s also difficult because the movie is otherwise such a mess, littered with missing details and dropped trains of thought, that the normal rules don’t apply.

[35:12] This is actually one of the things I love about bad movies: they tend to be unpredictable. Granted it tends to take the form of being random rather than clever, Also it’s really funny that Mathias is killing people for “getting too close”

[35:27] when seemingly no one actually suspects him. We don’t find out what Rafto knew, and there’s no indication that Vetleson knew anything. Mathias assaults, kidnaps, and kills Katrine, but she was single-mindedly pursuing Støp

[35:41] Now, maybe he killed Katrine to frame Støp, but it doesn’t matter story-wise because no one follows up on anything directly connected to Katrine’s murder,

[35:54] and the last we see of Støp is him sitting in his hotel room looking sad that he didn’t get to bang the cute brunette that was ready to jump him at the party. And that’s weird that a red herring like Støp would just be dropped from the story

[36:07] instead of being in some way actively resolved, because the movie clearly sets up that he has implicating evidence when he takes Katrine’s photo, Compounding that, the movie’s poor communication of time makes it look like Katrine is murdered

[36:24] to protect Mathias’ identity, and then the very next day he kidnaps his girlfriend and her son then calls Harry and all but tells him he’s the killer.

[36:36] It’s not really a game of cat and mouse, but a game of a plastic surgeon recklessly murdering a whole bunch of people, and the police who are too stupid to catch him “He was watching us the whole time.

[36:50] I’m not normally inclined to crawl through trailers for differences in footage. It’s not weird for trailers to use elements that aren’t present in the final film but in this specific case the trailers are a bit of a forensic aid in assembling a picture

[37:07] of exactly why certain things seem as odd as they do. The ending of the movie feels like it was constructed entirely out of juxtaposing because it probably was.

[37:22] Harry gets back to the cabin to recconect with Rakel and Oleg, and the eyelines between these two shots don’t line up, the characters don’t interact, and Harry is clearly, like, raising a rolling shutter or a garage door or something

[37:37] Also, we've been given a pretty good idea of the geography of the cabin and it makes no sense for him to be standing where it's implied he is.

[37:51] Like, in theory he's opening a door somewhere on this face of the house. One of the trailers for the film feature a number of shots of Mathias’ cabin as it appears in the climax, and most importantly features shots of the cabin exploding

[38:08] Clearly the original ending of the film involved Oleg and Rakel dying, or at least appearing to die. we might as well indulge in some forensics of our own.

[38:22] Since we just talked about the penultimate shot of Harry where he is clearly opening a garage door or something and not walking into the cabin, one of the trailers features this frame of Harry opening a garage door to reveal a body or possibly two sitting in a car.

[38:37] There are snippets of a conversation in the team’s room at the police station where Harry has this seemingly quite important line.

[38:49] that’s what a child does to establish order.” There’s a snowman kill that otherwise doesn’t match any location in the final film. One of the bigger, and odder, things from the trailers has to be very prominent use

[39:03] of footage from a very different sequence involving Sylvia Otterson. With Sylvia being pursued across a cement structure, through the woods, a sequence that I’ve been told is more book accurate

[39:19] than Sylvia being overpowered and killed in the chicken coop. Also the colour grade in the trailer is extremely different from the final movie. Now, it’s not weird for the grade in a trailer to be different from the final grade,

[39:33] but I’m at a loss to think of another high-profile example where the difference was this stark. The trailer is much more saturated and higher contrast. This detail probably wouldn’t have stood out to me at all if it weren’t for the fact

[39:47] that the grade in the finished film is so muted that when I watch it I feel like I’m watching untouched footage. I don’t think it’s truly untouched, but I’m not going to do a shot-by-shot audit

[40:00] of dynamic range to confirm, and, like, here’s some sample Alexa XT raw footage from Arri’s website - the Alexa XT was the camera they used on the film - Can you blame me?!

[40:16] I mean, I don’t think this is what happened, I don’t want to think this is what happened, I think this is probably just a creative decision that bugs me, personally, but if someone on the street walked up to me and told me that they accidentally mastered the film

[40:32] without applying the grade, and then the producers just left it because it would cost too much to fix, So that’s The Snowman, or at least a lot of The Snowman.

[40:46] It is both infuriating and fascinating because it’s actually pretty rare to see a film in this condition. Typically if something were this incomplete it just wouldn’t get released at all, but instead we get to witness the end product of the spiral of an unfinished movie.

[41:03] Because of what they failed to shoot, the filmmakers needed to cut more than just what was missing, taking deep bites out of everything else in the film, resulting in a relentless parade of things that just don’t quite line up.

[41:19] [dramatic classical music]