White Bird in a Blizzard is a 2014 artdramathriller film co-produced, written, directed and edited by Gregg Araki and starring Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, and Angela Bassett. Based on the novel of the same name by Laura Kasischke, the film follows several years in the life of teenager Katrina "Kat" Connors (Woodley), beginning on the day her mother, Eve (Green), disappeared and the effect this event has on her and the people of her life, frequently alternating between the present time and flashbacks. The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014 before being given a limited theatrical release on October 24, 2014.[4]
Plot
In 1988, when Katrina "Kat" Connors was 17, her beautiful but mercurial mother, Eve, disappeared without a trace. The story weaves back-and-forth with flashbacks of Eve's past life and the present day.
In the flashbacks, Eve was a wild girl who gradually changed into a domesticated housewife after marrying Brock, an ordinary man who leads an uneventful life. While Kat explores her blossoming sexuality with her handsome but dim-witted neighbor and schoolmate, Phil, Eve struggles to deal with aging and quenching her youthful wildness. She tries to be sexy when Brock is away, even luring Phil's attention. After Eve disappears, Kat deals with her abandonment without much issue, occasionally releasing her own wild side, seducing the detective investigating her mother's disappearance. The film then jumps forward three years to the spring of 1991. On a break from college, Kat returns home and seems unfazed to learn that her father is in a relationship with a co-worker.
The detective Kat has been having an affair with informs her that Brock might have killed Eve after catching her cheating. Kat dismisses this theory, just as she did three years previously. When she mentions it to her friends Beth and Mickey, they tell her they suggested this same theory to her and she dismissed them as well. Kat suspects Phil of having slept with Eve and confronts him the night before she is to return to college, but Phil angrily denies it and tells her that her father knows where her mother is.
Kat has recurring dreams of her mother stranded in the snow, and starts to unpack Brock's locked basement freezer but is interrupted when he walks in on her. She asks him if he does in fact know where she is, but he denies having any knowledge of her whereabouts. Believing her father, Kat bids him goodbye and tearfully boards her flight, returning to college. It is revealed that he went out to a bar shortly afterward and drunkenly admitted to murdering Eve and that he had moved Eve's body from the freezer to a nearby hill the night before Kat unpacked it. He is arrested and hangs himself with a sheet in his jail cell. When Eve's body is found, it is revealed that the body had been frozen for so long that after it was buried, that it had melted away.
The film ends with a flashback of Eve's death. Returning home from shopping the afternoon of her disappearance, Eve found Brock and Phil in bed together. Phil dashed off and Eve began laughing hysterically at Brock, incredulous. A humiliated Brock repeatedly begged her to stop, but Eve continued laughing until he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her to death.
The film opened in the United States in a limited release on October 24, 2014 in 4 theaters and grossed $6,302 with an average of $1,576 per theater and ranking #80 at the box office. After 7 weeks in theaters the film earned $33,821 domestically and $344,479 internationally for a total of $378,300.[2][3]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, the film has a score of 55% based on 92 reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The critical consensus states: "Part suburban thriller, part sexual awakening drama – and fully convincing as neither – White Bird in a Blizzard rests a little too heavily on Shailene Woodley's typically superlative work."[5] The film also has a score of 51 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[6]
Pop Insomniacs said, "We've seen versions of this story several times, but never quite mangled together like this before, which is precisely why I was so captivated, uncomfortable and surprised by this movie".[7]Kansas City Star reporter Jocelyn Noveck said, "It all comes down to a doozy of a plot twist, and it's enjoyably shocking. But at the end you're still left shaking your head, feeling lost, wishing there was something tangible to hold on to — perhaps a bit like being trapped in a snow globe... Two stars out of four".[8]
Stereogum ranked the film's 80s pop- and shoegaze-heavy soundtrack as the 16th best soundtrack of 2014.[9]
