It isn't long before she's not the only mom involved in a struggling family that ends up going missing before reappearing as a deceased and dismembered body. There is also always a snowman made at the scene of the crime. A pattern has emerged and Harry Hole, along with his investigation partner Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), are now setting out to find who's behind these killings of women and discover that this thing goes deeper than expected. Bratt suspects the person behind these killings could be someone of great local authority while Harry Hole is expanding his search to other nearby towns that suggest this might not be the first time this snowman-killer has engaged in such murderous antics.
The Snowman has no real identity to speak of as a film. It's neither enjoyable schlock nor thoughtful thriller fare nor even a cohesive combination of the two, it's just a shockingly empty piece of cinema that seems like it was constructed in a daze. The mystery the two lead characters engage in, for one thing, is pretty boring to watch, especially since two characters (one of whom is played by a woefully underused J.K. Simmons) that are seen as being potential culprits and/or accomplices to the murders are obviously not gonna be actually fitting those roles since the movies been so heavy-handed in saying "Could it be them???" that it's obvious another "twist" is just over the horizon. So that means much of the movie just has Fassbender and Ferguson sleep-walking through poorly staged interrogation or investigation scenes that really don't add up to much of anything.
Even worse on a storytelling level is how the various subplots and character arcs get organized. Harry is a booze-reliant detective whose an irresponsible dad and The Snowman's execution of that type of character is just so shallow and lacking in imagination, plus it doesn't have much of an impact on the movie until a dumb third-act climax straight out of Taken that revolves around Harry becoming a dad hero who has to save his estranged family. I couldn't even describe the personality of Katrine Bratt who seems to mostly exist so Michael Fassbender's character has someone to chit-chat with. Our two lead characters just sort of float around the movie as they wander from boring scene to boring scene, their individual lives and personalities never leaving an impact.
As for other cluttered story elements, maybe the most egregious is the way a subplot revolving around a detective character played by Val Kilmer is awkwardly introduced into the movie. Kilmer gets only three scenes, to my recollection, in the movie none of which really introduce crucial plot details or are even just simply entertaining, and his whole character ends up just being part of some abruptly introduced tragic backstory for Katrine. Why did we need these extensive flashbacks in this story? God only knows. In a movie so scattered it may as well be a bunch of leaves on a blustery Autumn afternoon, this is maybe the most nonsensical plot detour in a movie full of ludicrous story details.
The script for The Snowman, penned by three different individuals, is just so lethargic and lacking in either thoughtfully realized characters or suspenseful sequences. Tomas Alfredson's thoroughly generic directing compounds the lack of vigor in this story. I'm so sorry Alfredson, but no matter how many times you cut to a medium shot of only a simple snowman after a brutal murder scene, that snowman just doesn't get any scarier. As for the editing (which was done by two editors, one of whom is the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker), well, it's a total disaster, with awkward transitions between scenes and even sometimes just shots being a bizarrely common occurrence. I'd say such poor editing kept taking me out of the movie but that would have required the script to have engaged me at all in the first place.
The Snowman is pretty poorly assembled, all things considered, and even worse, it can't even have the decency to at least come up with some kind of crazy twist for who the snowman killer is that could have at least capped off an otherwise torpid feature on a note of entertaining ridiculousness. But no, instead some supporting character we've seen briefly twice is awkwardly revealed to be the baddie despite no real set-up to this crucial plot point. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose it wasn't wise to hope a movie like The Snowman that's so thoroughly plodding to pull out some kind of fun plot twist late into its third act, but hope is all ya got when you're stuck watching a movie as messy as The Snowman.
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