Frozen
Starring: Shirley Henderson, Roshan Seth, Richard Armitage
Director: Juliet McKoen
The film: A missing woman, a mysterious image on closed-circuit television footage, a desolate town - Frozen has all the trappings of a thriller. Juliet McKoen's directorial debut is more than that, however. Instead of a straightforward whodunit about the disappearance of a young woman, apparently in the wintry seas off the English fishing town of Fleetwood, Frozen is an intense psychological drama about the manifestation of loss and grief in a land of stoicism and emotional repression.
At the centre of it is fish-processing factory worker Kath (Shirley Henderson), who has yet to come to terms with the disappearance of her sister Annie (played by Henderson's real-life younger sister, Natalie) two years earlier.
Her dogged pursuit of what really happened leads her to a surveillance videotape at the factory that captured what appear to be Annie's last seconds: the young woman walks down a dark back alley, but, mysteriously, never comes into view of the camera at the top of the lane. A strange blur flashes on screen just as she vanished.
What follows is Kath's painful journey in coming to terms with her loss, partly through a search across the vast sandbanks, but also in her increasingly romantically ambiguous sessions with therapist Noyen (Roshan Seth). The simple story is made heart-wrenchingly beautiful by McKoen's visual sense, as she reveals Kath's confusion and pent-up angst amid terrifyingly epic depictions of the barren landscapes in seaside Lancashire.