It’s only when she gets to the other side of the reservation across the river that she realizes Lila’s true intention is to use Ray in the highly dangerous, incredibly risky yet overwhelmingly lucrative venture of human smuggling. Running Chinese and other immigrants who pay forty to fifty thousand dollars to gain entry from Canada into America via cars with push button trunks before they’re delivered to amoral “snakeheads” at a local motel that make the immigrants work for years to pay off their entry fee, soon the desperate Ray is in way over her head.
Still trying her best to legitimately provide for her family at Yankee One Dollar discount store where her rude manager denies her the chance at a full time position in favor for a young, skanky, and perpetually late girl with a visible lower back tattoo, Ray inevitably finds herself going back to work alongside Lila. And soon both women realize that they have far more in common than one would’ve assumed due to their initial prejudices and assumptions.
Although it’s erroneously labeled a traditional thriller and advertised as such, this tense and gripping character drama distributed by Sony Pictures Classics has earned its talented filmmaker countless accolades which is all the more admirable when one realizes it’s just her first feature length work. Deceptively leading the viewer into thinking it will end one of several ways, the film admittedly does venture into thriller territory as it continues but it never feels forced. Every moment seems entirely justified and logical given the character-driven approach and the roadblocks they face along the way.
Although Hunt admitted in Filmmaker that “it’s a hard movie to watch” since “most people don’t live in that world, and asking someone to sit there for 97 minutes and live in a trailer is tough,” (pg. 92) Frozen River is far worth the investment. As opposed to the endless, ugly indie dramas such as The Savages and Margot at the Wedding that we were bombarded with last year is that instead of pretentious, self-involved, overgrown children who don’t resemble anything remotely real, we’re painfully drawn in by Hunt’s authentic approach and the realization that mothers will stop at nothing to protect their children. In fact, Margot and The Savages are far more depressing than River is (for entirely different reasons) and Hunt is talented and intelligent enough to weave us through the many twists and turns of Ray and Lila’s journey in a way that we find ourselves incredibly compelled, sympathetic, fearful yet actively engaged through the whole running time.
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