Usually in film, if you see a gun in the first act, you know it will go off in the third.  In Snow Angels, after a deceptively innocent and yet subtly tense beginning as the faculty leader of a high school marching band tries to engage his group by asking them if they have a sledgehammer in their heart to use while playing “Sledgehammer,” two gunshots ring out in the distance and stop everyone cold.  Since young teenage Arthur (Forbidden Kingdom’s Michael Angarano) and his adorable photography student girlfriend Lila (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby) are present and accounted for from the start, we know they’re safe.  But the question then becomes who and what has occurred in their seemingly normal, small community.   

Helping to establish the film’s ominous tone aside from the sound of the shots themselves, All the Real Girls director David Gordon Green and his incredibly talented collaborative cinematographer Tim Orr (Choke) present the film’s title amidst a black background. Then, working its way into the tale as a nearly cinematic equivalent of a chamber piece of music, they introduce us to the setting with a series of innocuous imagery depicting the town as though it could be anywhere in these United States as residents go about their daily lives and we meet its incredibly small cast of characters.   

In doing so, we’re driven into the past as Snow Angels’ narrative moves several weeks earlier.  Yet a morbid shadow of doom lurks over the setting’s inhabitants first with Arthur’s unhappily married parents (Jeanette Arnette and Griffin Dunne) until the film fixates on the characters we instinctively know will be present in the deadly conclusion.  Unfortunately, the film avoids the classical rules of Shakespeare in foreshadowing the tragedy by naming the character(s) who will perish in the Bard’s plays by listing them in the title but from the moment we first glimpse Kate Beckinsale’s struggling blue collar mom, Annie, and her estranged, off-balance husband, Glenn (Sam Rockwell), we get the sense that they will be the ones marching towards an inevitable death.  And if it’s not their own, we realize it will be someone nearest to them.  While the film’s trailer leads us in one direction, our director (who adapted the screenplay from Stewart O’Nan’s novel for three years for another filmmaker before he ultimately helmed the project himself), takes us in quite another.    

Another independent filmmaking exercise in gloomy dysfunction, the actors are all top-notch and it’s their individual work that keeps us watching, even though we’re never entirely convinced any of the lead characters are worth caring about which—while it normally wouldn’t be a problem as cinema always offers its fair share of flawed heroes and surprisingly humane villains—in this film, it makes the final impact seem less provocative than the director had hoped.   

As the primary caregiver to her toddler daughter, Beckinsale’s Annie works as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant opposite Arthur, whom she used to babysit when he was younger (which leads to some odd, flirtatious conversations as we realize the extent of Arthur’s previous crush on his old babysitter).  However, while Arthur soon begins to fall for the geeky yet earnest new girl in school, Lila, Annie’s romantic life is far more unconventional as we discover her meeting the husband of her best friend and coworker Barb (Amy Sedaris) in a sleazy motel for frequent illicit trysts as one of the many items on her to-do list alongside shopping for her elderly mother.