The many ways in which writer-director Andrew Haigh and fiction author Colm Tóibín share a kinship of sensibilities, notably in their impeccable gifts for intimate character observation, breathe warming embers into the sub-zero elemental severity of A Long Winter. A coming-of-age drama that touches delicately on grief and resilience, family and home, queer sexuality and liberating self-discovery, the film’s muted tone will be considered under-powered by some. But audiences willing to tune in to its slow-burn introspection and immersive sense of place will find a humanity that is its own reward, particularly in the probing performances of Fred Hechinger, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.
Just as Haigh transposed the Japanese source novel from Tokyo to London in his 2023 stunner, All of Us Strangers, his adaptation of Tóibín’s novella — first published in the Irish author’s haunting 2006 short story collection Mothers and Sons before being issued as a standalone volume last year — relocates from the Spanish Pyrenees to Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. That landscape, magnificent but forbidding as fall lapses into the protracted, snowbound season that gives the film its title, helps make the material Haigh’s own, like a lost literary nugget of 1950s Americana.
