The Snowman has been reeking of calamity for months if you know how to read the signals. Tomas Alfredson, the acclaimed filmmaker of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Let the Right One In, returns with his first film in six years, and with a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Chlo Sevigny, it has all the makings of a spectacular event.
Even though the movie’s poster featuring a stick figure snowman and scribbled handwritten lettering has been everywhere, not many people know that Tomas Alfredson directed The Snowman until recently. The reviews were embargoed until a few hours before the first public showing on Thursday night, adding to the air of foreboding, and U.S. reviewers didn’t even see the film until Wednesday night.
Is Val Kilmer In The Snowman?
But let’s pretend you make it to a showing of The Snowman without any of this background information. You’ve been intrigued by the “MISTER POLICEMAN” advertising campaign, and Michael Fassbender certainly doesn’t hurt the cause. You could watch the first few minutes as Fassbender introduces us to his alcoholic Oslo detective Harry Hole and we learn the killer’s backstory, without suspecting anything is wrong.
The introduction of Val Kilmer’s character, a detective looking into the same killer’s atrocities in the city of Bergen nine years earlier, is the first hint that The Snowman will be a cataclysm of truly epic proportions. When it’s time for Kilmer’s Gert Rafto to speak, the film shifts to a shot from behind his head, making him a silhouette, while he listens to a man describe his missing wife.
His shoulders twitch like a puppet controlled by an invisible hand as he speaks. It’s just mildly unsettling at first, but by the time Kilmer gets through his third lines, it’s evident that another actor has redubbed his lines because the voice is reportedly coming out his lips and doesn’t sound like him all.
The second time Kilmer shows there is in an even crazier flashback. His character says nothing as he arrives at the snowy summit where the missing woman’s body has been deposited, set out like the parts of a gory jigsaw puzzle. The action, which lasts several minutes, is instead narrated by a disembodied voice on a walkie-talkie, which does nothing to hide the odd, choppy editing.When other characters try to engage Kilmer in conversation, he ignores them and instead appears on a mountaintop, rifle in hand, frightening a flock of birds.
A wordless scene in which Kilmer discovers a message given to him by the killer, a scene in which he climbs out the window of a police station, and a last, incredibly brief moment that I won’t disclose here makeup Kilmer’s remaining three scenes. He has, at most , ten lines of speech, all of which are delivered in the same, decidedly un-Kilmer-like tone. We wrote an article about Val Kilmer’s Health Problems. Please check it out.
Kilmer said in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit back in May that he had experienced “a healing of cancer” and that his tongue “was still swollen altho healing all the time,” so it’s likely that he just couldn’t get his dialogue out. A fair clue of how breathtakingly irresponsible and unprofessional the end product is is the fact that The Snowman opted for this weird workaround rather than recasting the part or reshooting his scenes.