Metacritic reviews

It’s a serviceable, watchable thriller, with very gruesome images.

Alfredson’s direction proves yawnsomely methodical, ticking off surviving plot points as though filling in some I-Spy Book of Scandinavian Crime Cliches.

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series is comprised of page-turning, airport-blockbuster Scandi crime potboilers; Alfredson scorches the seventh, The Snowman, with such art-house intensity that it eventually melts into an exhausted puddle.

A case of a missed opportunity. It references all the right films, but The Snowman comes off as a pale imitation.

All the signs pointed to a hit chiller: great cast, a director with fantastic form and a celebrated Jo Nesbø novel to draw from. So it’s a huge shame, then, that The Snowman is a bit grey and slushy when it should have been cool and crisp.

In short, the raw materials are there for a fun – if throwback – genre piece of the kind that kept ’90s cinema stocked with stiffs. Alas, the tension dissipates in a tangle of muddled subplots, sluggish pacing and some strange decisions from director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The result isn’t a Bone Collector, never mind a Se7en.

The glaring inadequacies of The Snowman are the only things shocking about it. Harry Hole’s film career could not have gotten off to a more inauspicious start.

The Snowman goes wrong quickly, permanently, and in a spiral, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken.