Mike (Fred Hechinger), the family's oldest son, returns to his home in the Colorado mountains in the 1950s.
While he proclaims that he wishes, from now on, to remain in the familiar small town that has been dying a painful death ever since the local mine shut down, this homeostasis of sorts is already deteriorating.
As Mike’s younger brother, Tommy (Kit Connor), leaves to fight in Korea, their mother, Louise (Caitríona Balfe), who has long abandoned her dream of leaving this place, drowns her despair in any available bottle; a secret that, it turns out, everyone knows except for Mike.
As the young man battles with repressed desires of his own, casting meaningful glances at a local police officer (Anthony Timpano), Louise walks out the door one day to disappear into an impending blizzard. The patriarch of the family, Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and his friends conduct a search, but soon inform Mike that, come spring, they need to watch the sky for vultures who will show them the way to the remains. Thus begins the titular long winter, filled with long walks through blinding white snow, persistent memories of everyone and everything that was lost, and uncomfortable yet potentially liberating introspection.
Three years ago, Fred Hechinger played another young man too stuck in a rut to make the changes he secretly covered, in a comedy slasher ironically called Hell of a Summer. A Long Winter, a new film by Andrew Haigh, the director of Weekend, 45 Years, and All of Us Strangers, is naturally a very different sort of movie, not only because of its polar-opposite temperature. Yet, beneath the vastly different aesthetic veneers, there is an unexpected underlying similarity: the notion that every tale about being trapped, whether by external forces or your own will, is also a tale about the possibility of breaking free.
Based on Colm Tóibín’s short story, which Haigh himself adapted, A Long Winter seems to strive to trap the audience along with its inquiring protagonist; its deliberately slow-burning pace allowing us to actually experience the sparkle cutting through the frozen ground. For all its visual beauty captured by cinematographer André Turpin (frequent collaborator of Xavier Dolan) and its memorable sound design filled with endless murmurs and creaks, A Long Winter is a film that is meant not so much to be watched and listened to but felt.
In this sense, it exists on a similar wave as last year’s New York Film Festival participant, Mascha Schilinski’s mesmerizing Sound of Falling. While the story in Haigh’s film doesn't span different timelines and generations, it shares its most memorable feature: The sense that we might not be as alone in our inner turmoils as we tend to think, that all the regrets, fears, and hopes we experience are echoes of someone else’s. As if it were an unexpected take on Gone Girl, the absence of Louise, who dreamed of leaving for years but never got a chance, turns into a grand presence that haunts the rustic house in the mountains, the story, and its inhabitants.
In contrast, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is great as a man who almost visibly shrinks in size, suppressed by his own set ways and preconceived notions about masculinity. Yet, the film truly belongs to Fred Hechinger, who gives a career-best performance in a challenging role of someone whose inner life is bared to us, despite his outer actions being stifled by the time, place, and weather.
Despite what the title and pace of Haigh’s film might suggest, it is not a movie about being frozen in time, but rather about verging on the precipice of being able to make a move. After all, no matter how long the winter, a change of seasons will always come, even if it brings vultures with it.
The film screens twice at the 2026 New York Film Festival. Visit the official festival site for more information.