89 min | NR | August 28, 2020 | IFC Midnight
A couple wakes up in their SUV, buried alive under a Norwegian avalanche, with no signal and a baby on the way. The walls are tight, the air is thin, and the marriage is already cracked. The premise traps you. The movie just leaves you stuck.
Naomi and Matt fall asleep in their car during a snowstorm and wake to find it entombed under feet of snow. The doors will not open. The phone has no signal. Naomi is pregnant. Centigrade confines its entire story to the interior of a frozen vehicle and dares the audience to feel the same panic the couple does. The film presents itself as a survival thriller. It is really a chamber drama about a marriage that fractures under pressure, and the survival mechanics exist mostly to force the two people to say the things they have avoided saying.
Genesis Rodriguez plays Naomi as the one who keeps inventorying the problem. She counts the food, rations the water, and tracks the cold, and Rodriguez lets the calm curdle into accusation as the days stack up. Vincent Piazza plays Matt as the husband whose competence is mostly performance. He insists on optimism and then snaps when the optimism fails to thaw anything. The two actors build a credible history of resentment in close quarters, and the best scenes are the fights about money and trust that have nothing to do with the snow.
Brendan Walsh directs from a script he wrote with Daley Nixon, and the single-location conceit is the whole bet. The cinematography lights the frozen interior almost entirely from one source, the car’s overhead dome lamp and the dashboard glow, which keeps faces half in shadow and the geography of the cabin deliberately vague. That choice sells the claustrophobia early. It also defeats the editing, because once the visual field is this restricted there is nowhere to cut to, and the film leans on time-stamp title cards to manufacture momentum the images cannot supply. The sound design does the heavy lifting, with muffled exterior cracks and the constant low hiss of the heater standing in for action that never arrives.
The problem is structural. Walsh commits to the confinement so completely that the film inherits the inertness of its premise. A buried car offers two states, waiting and arguing, and Centigrade cycles through them until the marital subtext stops deepening and starts repeating. Rodriguez and Piazza keep the performances honest, and the central idea of a relationship excavated by entrapment has real weight. The execution mistakes stillness for tension and runs out of air well before the snow does.