'My burning feet of fire!'

H.P. Lovecraft has been well-served by film makers, at least with regard to quantity; M.R. James, much less so (though I persist in thinking of the Japanese film Ring as Jamesian in essence). However, James and Lovecraft have both done rather well compared to Algernon Blackwood, a one-time bestselling author and popular broadcaster who is now almost forgotten. But one person who remembers is the writer/director Larry Fessenden. In the film The Last Winter Fessenden essentially updates 'The Wendigo' for the era of climate change.

The film is set in Alasa, at an oil prospecting camp within a conservation area. There's a lot of tension between the oil people and the ecologists who have to assess the damage that permitting extraction might cause. But an already fraught situation is made worse because one of the oil company team is acting very strangely, and the scientists are recording absurdly high temperatures even for an Arctic summer. And for Blackwood fans there's a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to his classic story - an email service called Defago Express.

The arrival of a hard-assed oilman, played by Ron Perlman, triggers confrontation among the human contingent. But is there something inhuman out there, waiting to deal with the interlopers? Yes, but fortunately it's not a monster in the conventional sense. Indeed, the only times the film seemed weak to me was when some kind of CGI 'thing' appeared. It was probably necessary for the distributors or other money people, but it somewhat undermined the air of mystery and awe.



What the trailer doesn't show is the second overt homage to Blackwood, this time at the moment things really come unstuck for our characters. Without giving too much away, the film tries do rather a lot on a limited budget. But it is well served by a good cast, solid script, some imaginative direction, and a soundtrack that is just weird and vague enough to make you believe that Something Is Coming. Not a flawless film, but one that does capture, for much of its length, that Blackwoodian sense of Nature as a being that can casually swat us if it notices us at all.