(courtesy IMDb)
Christmas is supposed to be a time of endless joy, peace and goodwill to all.
But life doesn’t always play by the idealitically warm and fuzzy rules we lay down for it, and while the festive season should be all chestnuts roasting and sleigh rides, or if you’re down south, beach picnics and carols on the lawn, the reality is sometimes it arrives and you are in a very dark place indeed.
That’s just where Julian (Mudit Gupta) finds himself in the movie adaptation of much-loved Norwegian classic, Snøsøsteren by written by Maja Lunde and illustrated by Lisa Aisato, mourning the loss of his exuberant older sister Juni (Nemi Wiklund) who has only been dead a few months, her absence casting a significant pall over the family’s Christmas celebrations.
As Christmas draws near, and the snow-covered streets of the stone-hewn old town are fill with happy shoppers and the burble of excited conversation, Julian’s family home is empty of anything festive, all the decorations locked away with Juni forbidden to be mentioned by the grieving boy’s mum and dad (Samsaya Sampda Sharma and Gunnar Eiriksson respectively) an days passing in numbed ordinariness.
One day while swimming at the local pool complex, the only place where it looks like Julian gets any peace, he sees a hugely animated young girl, dressed in a red coat and hat and a lustrous creak scarf, tapping on the window and waving.
Intrigued, he dresses and goes out to meet here where the full force of Hedwig (Celina Meyer Hovland) hits him with full extrovert force, her love for life and the Christmas season in particular pouring out of her, to such an unstoppable extent that while Julian likes her, he walks away, unable to cope with that much happy buoyancy when his world has fallen apart and lies in ruins.
He doesn’t feel like he’ll ever be happy again, and while his awkwardly sweet and well-intentioned friend tries to keep him company, Julian is quietly inconsolable.
Even so, something prompts him to seek Hedwig out and he goes to her home on the edge of town, a lavish mansion that is filled to the brim with Christmas trees and candles and twinkling lights; indeed, it is like a dream Norwegian Christmas writ large and as he sips hot chocolate with the garrulously exuberant Hedwig he begins to feel that maybe, just maybe, he, and his family, can be happy again.
As The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) progresses, he meets a mysterious old man called Henrik (Jan Sælid), who makes beautiful Christmas cards and who inspires Julian to keeps Juni’s memory alive, and restart the emotional life of his family, in the most creative and meaningful of ways.
It seems too that Henrik has a link to Hedwig who might be endlessly upbeat but who shies away from any discussion of her family, where her parents are and why it is she is sometimes not where Julian expects her to be.
To say anymore, would be to give away too many secrets of this quietly beautiful and thoughtfully ruminative film which is one of the most incisive films on loss and grief you’re likely to see.
Being a film set at Christmas, it is all but assured that The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) will end up an upbeat note of some kind, but what really works is the time the story affords itself to simply let the start realities of Julian’s grief-soaked life show themselves.
This is not someone who’s merely sad, he is utterly ruined and cataclysmically lost, and it’s going to take a whole lot more than some simple festive twist of fate to make things better.
Fittingly for a story of such robust emotional intelligence, and moving empathy, The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) doesn’t go the easy route, and Julian’s journey is allowed to play out much as it would in real life.
While Hedwig does spark life in him, and Henrik becomes a nurturing adult presence when his own parents, while loving, are paralysed by grief, he doesn’t immediately rebound from the intense pain of Juni’s loss and the steps he, and by his leading, his family take back to engaging with the world in its current festive guise especially, feel grounded and real while also being heartwarming and uplifting.
While the story as outlined, which comes with a huge reveal that you will likely see coming if you’re paying attention to clues scattered here and there, may seem exhaustingly depressing, it is actually far from that, with The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) attentiveness to the truth of the human condition when mired in grief feeling like a comfort rather than a dead weight.
In fact, as you walk with Julian through his grief, so heavily weighing on him that he can’t play or sing properly in the choir or do any of the things he once loved, you feel every sadness he does, but you also feel the stirrings of hope and possibility, the shift from mourning Juni’s absence to celebrating and remembering her and realising she lives on because Julian and his family, which includes rambunctious little sister, Augusta (Bal Advika), love and remember her.
Ultimately, The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) is a love letter, not so much to Christmas though it is bountifully and richly represented and accounted for, but to the capacity of the human heart to love, to care, to remember and to embrace all the good and wondrously beautiful things love offers.
Hedwig LOVES life, and because she keeps on loving it even when Julian is clearly asking what the point of anything is any more, he comes to love it again too, specially in its festive manifestation, and The Snow Sister (Snøsøsteren) finishes on a high and happy note while still fully respecting that while Christmas may be the most wonderful time of the year, we aren’t always in a place to fully respect that, and that that’s okay until, maybe, eventually we are, in our own way and our own time.