The bland title of the film serves as a foreshadowing of how uninteresting the next 75 minutes will be. Snow Valley manages a unique magic trick: a horror film with no elements of horror in the first half and seemingly every horror cliché in the remaining twenty-five minutes. Writer/Director Brandon Murphy tragically passed away in 2022; this was his last film. He was better known for co-scripting Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. If only some of the screenwriting talent on display in that film were seen in this one, because the majority (but not all) of the films flaws are from the writing.

Laura (Rachel Michiko Whitney) and Heath (Cooper van Grootel) have been together for a year and are planning on getting engaged (yay!) She is stressed because she is “writing [her] dissertation paper.” (Free tip – it’s either a dissertation [the capstone of a doctoral program] OR a paper [what many classes in the arts and humanities end with]).  He is ridiculously wealthy – his family owns a palatial mansion in the mountains with its own trail to the local ski slopes. The film spends the first ten minutes establishing how wealthy he is and how blasé he is about it, as his true passion is designing and manufacturing snow boards. They arrive just ahead of a storm that is greatly discussed by all the characters, but never seen, even when we are told it is raging outside.

He proposes with a ring in a box of pizza and a whole lot of backstory and exposition. The film finally perks up with the arrival of Ed (Tom Williamson), who brings an actual character to the show. The character is obnoxious and unlikable, even his friends don’t care for him, but at least he is interesting compared to our leads, breathing a spark of life into a film that otherwise comes across as watching stranger’s home movies as they go about an everyday day.

We are forty minutes into Snow Valley (more than halfway) when we finally learn Laura’s dissertation concerns children with developmental disabilities who evince ESP. Seems like you’d want to frontload that character info in the film. She studies autistic children who have predictive powers, “kind of like The Shining.” She has also seen two bearded men who may or may not be the ghosts of dead miners, but who knows? Who cares? They’re there to be vaguely spooky, but manage to only be vague.

Ed then reveals, all in the same scene, that there used to be an old mine shaft nearby, or maybe under the mansion, that was then used as a hospital for the mentally ill, until it exploded, killing all of the patients and the staff, and the engagement dinner is on the anniversary of the explosion. (Why not throw in that it was built on a Native American burial ground where Old Man Vorhees killed all those kids? Why have one or two horror movie cliches when you can have them all?)

Then the mining ax on the wall goes missing.  Oh, and it turns out the family had Brian, Heath’s psychotic, illegitimate half-brother, locked in the attic the whole time because he has not spoken a word since birth and has violent tendencies. Heath is ridiculously blasé at this point in the film – “I knew you’d overreact. If any of this ever got out, my dad’s reputation would be ruined.” So of course Laura runs through the house to escape Heath and runs straight into Brian (Zachary Bird), who it turns out looks as if he is nine. Hardly the psychotic violent monster that was talked up. The ending is nonsensical.

The challenge of Snow Valley is that the backstory and inciting incidents are not revealed until more than halfway through, the characters are not anyone we have built up empathy or concern for, and the story, in the end, is neither logical nor satisfying. It feels like someone told an AI program to write a buddy ski-comedy / gothic horror mashup. The result is sadly not scary, not interesting, and unsatisfactory.

2 out of 10