A Long Winter review – hope, desire and subversion in Andrew Haigh’s beautiful winter western — SkimNews
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- Andrew Haigh adapted and directed A Long Winter, relocating Colm Tóibín’s 2006 story from 1930s Spain to 1950s Colorado during the Korean War era.
- Lester, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, struggles to manage his household after his wife Louise vanishes in winter, exposing his emotional incapacity and cruelty.
- Mikey, Lester’s son portrayed by Fred Hechinger, harbors secret gay longings and finds unexpected connection with Jimmy, a biracial boy taken in as domestic help.
- Louise, played by Caitríona Balfe, disappears during a breakdown, leaving behind a household of men unmoored by her absence and repressed by their isolation.
- Jimmy, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-a-Tai, is subjected to Lester’s homophobic abuse while forming a quiet bond with Mikey amid the snowbound landscape.
- André Turpin shot the film, capturing the stark, vertiginous beauty of the Colorado winter as a visual metaphor for emotional isolation and latent desire.
Why it matters: The film reframes male grief not as stoic endurance but as a volatile mix of denial, freedom, and suppressed longing—revealing how absence can unlock forbidden emotional space. For audiences, it shifts the western genre’s emotional grammar, centering queer yearning and domestic collapse over frontier myth.
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