Fritt vilt / Cold Prey / Cold Prey – Eiskalter Tod

Five friends – two couples and a single man – go snowboarding in the Jotunheimen skiing region. When one of them is injured during a downhill run, they take refuge in an abandoned mountain lodge. But there is a pickaxe-wielding murderer on the loose in the hotel, who goes after the quintet one by one... Teen angst amid deep snowdrifts. $Cold Prey% enhances the hotel horror movie genre with characteristically Norwegian cultural and natural elements. One is the soundtrack featuring hits by youth-oriented artists from Wencke Myhre to Turbonegro. Another is the wintery landscape around the Leirvassbu lodge – a building as iconic as the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s $The Shining% (1980), to which Uthaug shows due reverence here. The atmospheric use of light and colour, breathtaking mountain panoramas in Cinemascope, and not least of all Ingrid Bolsø Berdal ($The Seed%, NFL 2023) as the confident final victim made this $snow nightmare% so successful that it was followed by a sequel in 2008 and a prequel in 2010.