Lukas Rinker made his FrightFest debut in 2022 with his single situation horror, Holy Shit, which told of a man trapped inside a portaloo. Now Rinker is back at the festival with another survival nightmare, Frostbite. This time rather than a lone man, it is a somewhat estranged family who find themselves stuck together. Rather than a portaloo, the setting is the confined space of a cable car that gets buried in an avalanche. Getting trapped inside a toilet is one thing, but Frostbite sees the group having to tackle a lack of food, water and heat, aftershocks, and a whole lot more than an outhouse full of poop.
At only eight-two minutes, Rinker wastes no time in getting Frostbite started. Within the first twenty minutes, all of the key players, their relationships to one another, and the inciting avalanche all happen. This is just enough time to set the characters up so that the audience are happy to follow their story without overloading the plot and frustrating the viewer. As Frostbite unfolds, Rinker is careful to keep the audience’s attention at the forefront of the film’s construction. This means that every ten to twenty minutes, Frostbite changes itself up in some way. There is a new character development of hardship for the family to endure, and there’s little chance for the audience to get bored.
Whilst Frostbite ensures that there are ever increasing stakes for the characters to deal with, towards the end there comes a leap too many. It’s not that the event doesn’t make sense, but more that so much has happened during the short runtime that the viewer becomes a little numb to the new challenge and so it doesn’t land with quite the impact that they had hoped for. It is a slight misstep on what is otherwise a fun survival jaunt. The stakes feel more life and death than in Holy Shit and the use of more characters makes for a smoother viewing journey as there are more characters to connect with than the one onscreen and the disembodied voices with whom he speaks. Of course Rinker’s two movies are quite different from one another outside of their single location set-ups, but when combined together provide proof that the director definitely has a handle on this subgenre of horror.
Frostbite
Summary
Lukas Rinker returns with another single situation thriller, one that ups the stake to create a very dramatic story of survival.
Frostbite was reviewed at Tubi FrightFest. Frostbite will be released in early 2027.
