The Thaw
2023 · 16m · United States
Directed by Sean Temple, Sarah Wisner
Genres: fantasy, historical, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
In 19th-century Vermont, Ruth's parents drink sleeping tea and spend the winter packed in snow, but an early thaw wakes them from hibernation too soon.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The hibernation premise is genuinely weird—body horror meets folk ritual—but the execution plays it too straight, all austere Vermont gothic without the perversity that would make it *actually* unsettling instead of just handsome and dark.
Temple and Wisner have constructed something formally deliberate here: the thaw as both plot mechanism and metaphor for the uncanny breach of natural order, shot with the restraint of someone aware they're working in a lineage of New England body-horror and slow-burn dread that stretches back through literature.
The decision to keep the parents' consciousness ambiguous—awake but paralyzed, or truly dreamless—anchors the entire film's unease, and it's a single narrative choice that transforms what could've been a gimmick premise into something genuinely disorienting and alive.