Film Review: 'Below Zero'

Like a behemoth, a frozen cow hangs from the ceiling while screenwriter Signe Olynyk powers up her laptop inside the comfort of a slaughterhouse freezer. She remains locked inside for five days finishing a screenplay. Next to venture inside this Edson, Alberta, freezer-room, in a bid to end his writer’s block, is Jack. His agent organizes this fully equipped slaughterhouse to act as his temporary home –what better way to create a reality than to experience it oneself?

‘Below Zero’ is a masterpiece of Albertan film. Late in September, this brilliance had its world premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival. Gory? Definitely. Michael Berryman playing a serial killer? Yes, indeed. A typical horror film? Not in the least. ‘Below Zero’ tells a remarkably intelligent, witty, boundary-blurring story-within-a-story-within-a-story, reverted back to the actual story. And it all takes place in a slaughterhouse freezer. Postmodernism at its apex.

If screenwriter Signe Olynyk couldn’t blur the boundaries enough by writing her screenplay from this freezer herself, her main character, Jack (Edward Furlong), also writes screenplays and tests his patience in the same freezer. The film begins by following Jack but quickly switches to his narrative, swapping the audience back and forth between Jack’s fictitious words and his reality in the freezer. Or is it the other way around, where his words are reality and the freezer fictitious?

With a gruesome screenplay to tell, Jack casts Michael Berryman as Jack the Hack, a disturbed serial killer who raises a mute son in an aging slaughterhouse. Jack himself develops a friendship with the actual slaughterhouse owner, played by Kristin Booth. Boldly, she informs him that she also writes screenplays and conveniently placed hers on a shelf in the freezer, urging Jack to read it while he attempts to cure his writer’s block. She also has a mute son. Quickly, the audience experiences how connected an author becomes with his work.

To top things off, the true owners of this abandoned Edson slaughterhouse have a ten-year-old daughter, Sadie Madu. She courageously auditioned for the parts of the film’s two mute boys, succeeds and plays these roles brilliantly. All these tales wrap within themselves, unraveling overall in an exquisite film with intelligent dialogue. Early on, Jack is warned, “You know what they say about monsters: you gotta’ be careful not to become one.” Signe Olynyk knows what they say about screenplays: the best ones are not written at all, they are lived.