Film-makers Claire Coache and Lisle Turner are a couple who survived the horrific experience of losing two babies during pregnancy: one to a medical termination and one to miscarriage. With Cold, they transmute this trauma into a near-wordless performance of allegorical art, one that was filmed during lockdown first in an empty theatre and is now being distributed online for free in order to make the subject accessible to everyone. That’s both very noble and savvy because this discreet, extremely intimate film starring two barely known actors might have struggled to pull in paying customers considering the subject is so painful.
Janet Etuk and Jacob Meadows play a couple first met waiting in a hospital to be seen by a doctor, stressed and worried about the child she’s carrying. In search of distraction, she asks him to tell her a story, and what follows from there is the rest of the film, acted out on a stage where snow falls and the two of them, named as Ulf (Meadows) and Falda (Etuk) in the intertitles, struggle through the winter. Transformed into a now-mute couple forced to survive on foraged and hunted food with only a wood cabin for protection, they are at one point forced to make unconscionable decisions about Falda and the baby’s future by a “Hex Doctor” (Coache herself) when the pregnancy goes wrong.
It’s all transformed into folk/fairytale-style dream logic, with little babies made of ice and wombs that glow like lanterns; it’s very theatrical but evocative. With no dialogue to work with, Etuk and Meadows do sterling work emoting and expressing the whole gamut of emotions, from hope, to agony and on through madness and resignation. Painful stuff, to be sure, but cathartic in its way.
