Homicide meets Horror in Gustavo Sampaio’s found footage movie The Coldness, as an ex-detective’s obsession with a mysterious pair of supposed suicides 24 years apart appears to turn into something supernatural.
Nick Polito (Paul Parducci) is a retired Jersey City homicide detective. He’s struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife, and truth be told, he’s not got over forced retirement due to being shot in the knee on duty.
A particular case from his past has also long haunted him. In 1999, a woman seemingly commited suicide after rigging her fridge to be lockable from the inside and go to sub-zero temperature. Nick hasn’t ever been sure about the case being deemed suicide, as everything pointed to this woman being a happy, healthy person. And this latest case appears to be exactly the same, but this time not in New jersey, but in Los Angeles.
Is the grieving Nick simply reaching for a coincidence to be something more? Perhaps, but what seals it for him is the suicide note. In both cases, the exact same, unusual phrase was written, and nobody in the public could know that.
So Nick decides he’s going to make a documentary to investigate the new case and see if it’s connected. What begins as a chance to feel like a detective again becomes something else entirely as Nick discovers there could be an occult link between the two deaths, and it leads him down an entirely different obsessive path in search of the truth and something more.
It’s a nice swerve from crime mystery to occult rabbit hole, but once that turn does come, it does feel painfully obvious where things are going to go. But the journey is more interesting than the destination, right? Well to a point in this case, because the journey makes the payoff worthwhile.
At the heart of everything that works in The Coldness is Parducci’s performance as Nick. He plays Nick as a typical ex-cop, looking for a new outlet and ultimately returning to what he knows at the first opportunity. It’s a telling trait for Nick because it’s a warning of what he’s ignoring in his quest. There are plenty of warnings for the viewer and even if the outcome feels predictable, it’s built on the frustrating dread of what lengths Nick is willing to go to. Early on, Nick speaks about visiting a priest after his wife dies and gets worked up at the priest’s suggestion his mood and behavior are born of grief.
In another instance, he claims the recent suicide victim had a happy life, was ambitious, and was growing her makeup tutorial channel. Some of that is true, but when her last video is shown, it’s clear she’s suffered from the toxic atmosphere of being online in that manner.
It’s clear Nick’s judgment and perception aren’t what they were, and his increasing personal bias colors his every decision. It amusingly leads to one of the most blatantly spelled out, ”You really shouldn’t do this” scene you’ll ever see, but by that point, you can just about understand why Nick is willing to be wilfully ignorant to the dangers he could be in.
And so we arrive at the payoff, and while it was clear early on what Nick would try to do, the last twenty minutes really start to make you reconsider the supernatural element. I liked this because it doesn’t rule out either school of thinking and made me think back to certain actions and statements made by Nick during the documentary.
The Coldness takes the found footage model in an interesting direction, even if it stays fairly close to the core tenets of the sub-genre. It eschews pure occult madness for something a bit more grounded, and that adds a tragic flavor to Nick’s search for something, anything to give his life fresh meaning.
SCORE: 7/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 7 equates to “Good.” A successful piece of entertainment that is worth checking out, but it may not appeal to everyone.
The Coldness is screening as part of the Unnamed Footage Festival.
