Frozen (2010)

Adam Green followed up his 2006 horror film Hatchet, with this small scale affair, based around a simple premise and with just 3 characters. The setup concerns a pair of best friends, Joe and Dan, played by Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers and Dan's girlfriend Parker (Emma Bell). After spending the day at a local ski resort they take a late in the day lift out to the peak for one last run. From here a misunderstanding leaves them stranded, the staff gone home for the week and the power shut off, all the while their lift hangs 30+ feet over the snow miles from safety. The rest of the film simply deals with this situation, and how these characters react, prompting an effective case of 'what would you do' in the viewer. Green is careful early on to not only introduce the character dynamics, but also emphasise the realism of the situation. The logical leaps aren't that great for you see such a situation occurring and in this respect the film is effective, sidestepping many of the conveniences horror films often have to bypass in order to generate tension and scares.
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Here the tension comes from the rock and hard place choices these characters have to make, there is no obvious way out, the fractious nature of the friendships, tensions between best friend and girlfriend are nicely observed and the cast does generally good work, Shawn Ashmore in particular. The characters they have are recognisable but not especially memorable, perhaps by design. It soon becomes clear that the lift will be focus of the film, and Green does a generally good job of stretching out the film by incorporating various obstacles and problems to overcome as the film progresses. It is difficult to hold the audience's interest with such a limited scope and the film does suffer from this, it doesn't help that a moment about half way through that is clearly meant to be shocking winds up being almost comical through the over the top way it is put together. The film also relies on contrivances such as a local pack of wolves that makes an appearance to circle below the lift, filling in for the absence of any kind of real antagonist (aside from the weather). 
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With such a slender premise the film isn't able to really sustain the interest that it might have if it had been slightly more ambitious. Again I admire the effort to put together a claustrophobic character study more than a typical horror film, but I don't feel that on the whole these characters are strong enough, nor the premise effective enough to really work as well as intended.
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The film though is relatively short, and does make good use of it's options. The depictions of the characters as they suffer through the cold feel authentic and suitably horrific but the lack of either a clear goal or plan (other than 'escape') or time constraint make some of the middle sections drag. Overall Frozen is an interesting experiment in minimalism, it uses it's premise well and features some good performances but ultimately feels hampered by it's own small-scale ideals.