A Long Winter

Sunday, September 17: This screening will be presented with open captions and live captioning for the onstage components.

Following the extraordinary emotional resonance of 2023’s All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh returns with a period drama occupying the liminal space between hope and acceptance. Adapted by Haigh and Colm Tóibín from the acclaimed Irish novelist’s short story, A Long Winter follows Mike (Fred Hechinger), a young man on the cusp of adulthood whose life is upended when his alcoholic mother disappears during the first blizzard of the season. As the search stretches from days into weeks, the onset of winter becomes inseparable from the family’s slow reckoning with the possibility that she may never return.

While Mike’s emerging sexuality forms part of his journey, Haigh’s gaze remains fixed on something broader: the emotional fault lines that open within a family when normalcy is ruptured. Set in the mountains of Montana and filmed in the breathtaking Canadian Rockies, the vast landscape is both beautiful and unforgiving, mirroring the emotional distance between Mike and his stoic father. Haigh’s patient, intimate filmmaking finds an ideal companion in Tóibín’s measured storytelling, where every silence, glance, and gesture carries extraordinary weight.

Hechinger (The White Lotus) embodies Mike’s evolution with remarkable sensitivity. Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) is superb as an aging father struggling to express his own grief, while Caitríona Balfe (Belfast, TIFF ’21) leaves a profound impression as the absent mother whose disappearance shapes every moment that follows. With memorable support from Kit Connor (Heartstopper) and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), A Long Winter is beautifully observed work from one of contemporary cinema’s most compassionate filmmakers.

JASON RYLE

Content advisory: brief scenes of animal slaughter