Director Lukas Rinker emerged onto the horror scene in 2022 with Holy Shit! – his horror film about a man trapped in a porta-potty. Taking full advantage of the scatological potential which accompanies such a premise, it’s one of the most unpleasant films to fall under the People Stuck in Stupid Places or Things umbrella. Rinker goes a bit more ambitious with his next film – set on the side of a vast mountain range in the aftermath of a devastating avalanche, it follows the family of survivors trapped in a crashed cable car.
Stuck in there with his geologist ex-wife (Zoe Boyle) and resentful teenage daughter (Lily Curley), former pro skater Charles (Kris Hitchen) attempts to navigate their escape. Easier said than done, when everyone is giving him a hard time about it. This includes government lobbyist Mactavish (Andrew Scarborough, boasting a fearsome Kenneth-Branagh-as-Poirot moustache) who’s not letting a little thing like a serious leg injury stop him from spitting bile at Charles and the women. As if being trapped under metres of snow wasn’t bad enough, the situation goes from bad to worse as the group’s car are beset with various hazards, including aftershocks, hungry wolves… and each other.
Frostbite does little to reinvent the survival thriller. Instead, it boasts some gorgeous shots of Canada’s Mount Killgore, and a delightfully nasty performance from Emmerdale’s Graham himself (stupid sexy Scarborough). The rest of the cast aren’t particularly well served by Rinker and Peter Ahlén’s screenplay – in retrospect, it’s perhaps for the best that Thomas Niehaus spent most of Holy Shit! by himself. This is only compounded by a sequence of events which is implausible even by the subgenre’s standards. No-one’s expecting stark realism from what is essentially a horror version of that Simpsons episode, but Rinker could have at least stuck to the rules of basic resuscitation.
Still, Frostbite is a fun survival thriller with lush visuals and claustrophobic, vertiginous action sequences. One wishes the company could have been a little more tolerable, but it makes good use of its snowbound setting and perilous environment.
FROSTBITE premiered at Tubi FrightFest on August 28, 2026.
