When home-schooled Arielle’s long-estranged mother mysteriously returns to their isolated family farm, it drives a wedge into her seemingly-perfect relationship with her father and reveals a chilling, dark past.

Ice Blue is an indie film that explores a complicated family drama with YA and ghostly elements. Beautifully shot and well-acted, Ice Blue is a tragedy and a great show as the debut feature from its director, Sandi Somers, whose film has won numerous nominations since beginning showings at festivals and who herself has won Best Director categories at the 2018 Best of Calgary, the 2017 LA Femme Film Festival, and others. Written by Jason Long, Ice Blue stars Sophia Lauchlin Hirt (Bad Times at the El Royale), Michelle Morgan (Diary of the Dead), Charlie Kerr, and Billy MacLellan (The Silence). 

Arielle (Sophia Lauchlin Hirt) lives a sheltered life, home-schooled on her dairy farm where she lives with her father, John (Billy MacLellan). When Christian (Charlie Kerr), a boy from out of town, is sent to live with his aunt in their small community, Arielle finally has a friend and an interest in love that she never had before. As she begins to venture off of their farm, she soon learns secrets about her family through the town gossip, putting a wedge in their once close father/daughter relationship. On the evening of her sixteenth birthday, her long lost mother, Maria (Michelle Morgan), begins to visit her, further complicating things in their family when she begins to tell yet more secrets to young Arielle. As Arielle desperately tries to work out the facts from the fiction taught to her throughout her life, everything eventually comes to a head when her mother delivers on her promise of having unfinished business. 

Ice Blue is a quiet but beautiful movie, set in the majestic background of Calgary, Canada. At first, I feared that it would be something like Twilight, an aesthetically and emotionally gloomy teen romance movie with supernatural elements, but I was proven wrong. The characters are much more authentic and it is a more vulnerable portrayal of the breakdown between a father and daughter with a first romance as the catalyst. The supernatural elements are not realized until its climax, which is also the only point in the movie that is thrilling. It is a psychological, coming of age film with a dark filter, which made for an interesting watch.

The film has a nice vibe too it and moves along at a steady pace. The pace does seem to quicken towards the end as the secrets pile up and spill over, giving the movie its dark, dreamy, and surprising ending that seems to be slightly open to interpretation. Though the ending is contradictory to the information given to the audience, the actors did well with what they were given and Somers did her best to interpret it. 

In the end, as always, it is ‘like mother, like daughter’ in this dark melodrama — a slurry of romance and isolation, secrets and truth, and seemingly unbreakable psychological generational curses. The trailer and posters make it look much heavier and thriller-like than it is, however, Ice Blue is still a good movie for what it is — a dark family melodrama. It is slow-paced, but it takes the scenic route thanks to the cinematography of some well-framed and pretty shots. Released this November, this haunting mild-thriller is available on digital and on-demand to give you chills… though more so from its cold setting than its content.