Cold Review – theatrically evocative folktale treatment of the pain of miscarriage

Ffilmmakers Claire Coache and Lisle Turner are a couple who survived the horrific experience of losing two babies during pregnancy: one to a medical termination and one to a miscarriage. With Cold they transmute this trauma into an almost wordless performance of allegorical art, which was first filmed in an empty theater during the lockdown and is now distributed for free online to make the subject accessible to everyone. That is both very noble and wise, because this discreet, extremely intimate film starring two barely known actors might have had difficulty attracting paying customers, given the subject matter’s so painful nature.

Janet Etuk and Jacob Meadows play a couple they first met waiting in a hospital for a doctor, stressed and worried about the child she is carrying. Looking for a distraction, she asks him to tell her a story, and what follows is the rest of the film, played on a stage where snow falls and the two, named Ulf (Meadows) and Falda (Etuk). ) in the intertitles, you struggle through the winter. Transformed into a now mute couple forced to survive on farmed and hunted food with only a wooden hut for protection, they are at one point forced by a ‘Hex Doctor’ (coach himself) to make unscrupulous decisions about Falda and the future of the baby. the pregnancy goes wrong.

It’s all transformed into folk/fairy tale style dream logic, with little babies made of ice and wombs that glow like lanterns; it is very theatrical but evocative. With no dialogue to work with, Etuk and Meadows do an excellent job of touching and expressing the full range of emotions, from hope to pain and so on to madness and resignation. Painful stuff, sure, but cathartic in its own way.