The Thaw (2023)
Directed & Written by Sean Temple & Sarah Wisner
Starring Emily Bennett, Toby Poser, & Jeffrey Grover.

16 minutes

Horror / Thriller

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains SPOILERS!
Avert thine eyes, lest ye be spoilt.

Back in 2020 during the wonderful festival Nightstream, I discovered Sarah Wisner and Sean Temple’s short film Thorns, a clever little story from a queer and female perspective that subverted elements of classic horror films, and now I’ve been lucky enough to get my eyes on their latest short, The Thaw (perfectly subtitled A Horror Folktale). In The Thaw, a young woman called Ruth (Emily Bennett) returns home to live with her parents, Alma (Toby Poser) and Timothy (Jeffrey Grover), as they prepare to face an especially tough, lean winter with little resources during a harsh 19th-century Vermont winter, which forces them to fall back on an old, albeit dangerous tradition in order to hopefully survive the season.

Some films that take an allegorical approach can be frustrating because they drift too deep into ambiguity for their ultimate message to be strong, or clear, enough, whereas a film like The Thaw sticks close enough to their message, while still being creative and unique, so that the audience doesn’t get lost in a sea of interpretation just to gain an understanding of the images and themes onscreen. The Thaw is a hauntingly relevant story in the 19th century that is still of relevance today about how men’s figurative hunger for resources, here represented by the family patriarch’s literal hunger, is a terrifying detriment to us all.
The strains of patriarchy are clear from the early moments of the film when Ruth is essentially returned to her parents like an item refunded at the store. Today, we’d call it divorce, but back in the 19th century, that was highly uncommon, doubly so for those who were not of the bourgeois class; poor and working-class people did not typically divorce or split up back then. In The Thaw, women are treated like resources: “He said I wasn‘t worth the cost of my keep,” Ruth tells her mother after she’s been brought back home by her husband. Later in the film, after the “sleeping tea” is concocted and Alma won’t wake up from her winter coffin bed, Timothy blames his daughter for making the mixture wrong. The father rages at Ruth, saying: “Can‘t keep a man full, can‘t keep a man satisfied.” But he’s the one whose hunger is sucking up all the resources. Timothy doesn’t even consider what got them to this point in the first place—what made his daughter have to even prepare the tea, what necessitated him and his wife going into hibernation. It’s always easier for men to blame women, or some other group, for what’s wrong in society—or in the film’s case, the family—rather than look at the root causes and, heaven forbid, accept a little responsibility.

On top of patriarchy making women into scapegoats, The Thaw‘s idea of an ‘early thaw’ and unexpected results from the sleeping tea evoke current-day concerns about the ways in which climate change is altering our lives for the worse, even as the societal fathers, like Timothy, fill their greedy guts endlessly. Most obviously, we can compare this to big corporations, the majority of which, if not all, are owned by wealthy men, sucking up all the resources while not worrying about how it affects anybody else, or the future as a whole. It’s just as applicable on a smaller scale, like when it comes to the waste created by social media influencers/content creators all across the online space, whether it’s tons of food being wasted (not even eaten) to make foolish ‘content’ on TikTok and Instagram Reels, or money getting wasted buying bullshit to use only once in a YouTube video. Admittedly it’s not all men doing that, either. The Thaw concerns itself with the patriarchal figures in our societies who are blindly wasting finite resources while those beneath them suffer for it, but in real life it’s a problem that’s created from wherever power lies; most often it’s wealthy men who use their capital to do nothing but fill their own bellies, though sometimes it’s privileged people of all genders selfishly wasting away one resource after another to keep the likes and the money flowing in. Regardless of how you read the film, The Thaw is a chilling little moral tale of how greedy, cold, and ugly the world has been for a long, long while.