Oh My Horror 2025 | 51/52 | Winter Horror
When I was still just a kid, I remember my father telling me what he thought it took for a man to be happy. Simple things really: a wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who like and respect him. And for a while there, without hardly even realizing it, I had all that — I was a happy man.
In the snowy hills of Wright County, Minnesota, a fox observes a henhouse. A crow observes. Hank gets off early from his job as an accountant at Delano Feed and Grain Mill. He goes home to see his pregnant wife, Sarah, and change clothes before meeting his brother, Jacob, and Jacob’s unexpected friend, Lou, to put flowers on their mother’s grave. While Hank sets the flowers, Lou writes his name in the snow with urine. Jacob exuberantly joins in on the fun.
The fox raids the henhouse. Jacob drives Hank and Lou back. The fox runs across the road, causing Jacob to swerve on the snowy roads and collide with a tree. Enraged, Jacob grabs his hunting rifle, even though they’re in a nature preserve. Hank tries to stop him, but Lou encourages Jacob. In the woods, crows line the trees, waiting for something dead to consume. Lou throws a snowball into the woods. It collides with what looks like a snow embankment, but as the snowball collides, the snow drops away to reveal a crashed airplane.
Jacob and Lou clear the remaining snow off the plane while Hank opens the hatch. Crows peck at the dead pilot’s eyes. They also find a bag stuffed with $100 bills. Lou suggests that it’s drug money. Hank wants to turn the money in to the police and let them handle it, but Lou insists they keep it. Hank reminds them that someone will likely go looking for such a hefty sum, but Jacob thinks they should hold onto the money until someone comes looking for it. Hank, pulled into the scheme, suggests it be him. If no one comes asking for the money, they split it three ways and get out of town. If they do, he’ll burn it.
What does money do to the man who believes he has everything that should make him happy? How does he keep it together with a destructive brother threatening to pull it all apart?
While Billy Bob Thornton’s performance is the most outstanding, Bill Paxton’s subdued everyman is what holds the movie together. The central conflict of the story is Hank’s humble but honorable existence versus the promise of wealth and the burdens it could ease. Also, Bridget Fonda’s Sarah is probably the smartest of the group, so when she gets in on it, she brings a shrewdness, as well as the knowledge that they must be careful for the rest of their lives.
I love watching the characters debate the ethics of what they’re doing. We’re not given calculating, intelligent characters: we’re given real people who think they have a handle on what is happening to them. We also see what the promise of money does to their moral compasses.
The symbol of the crow is as portentious as it gets. The fox robbing the henhouse is as apparent as it gets, but I appreciate the way it ties in — the fox’s greed costs Jacob, so Jacob goes hunting him, even if the fox didn’t mean to cause any harm.
The filmmaking is all about restraint — an unexpected approach from director Sam Raimi and composer Danny Elfman. DP Alar Kivilo wanted to keep the shots simple and let the characters tell the story. They tried to keep the lighting as natural and middle-gray as possible, especially in the outdoor scenes, even going so far as to recreate gray skies using CGI on sunnier filming days.
It’s astonishing that this movie got made at all — it spent years in development hell, going through multiple screenwriters’ and directors’ hands. Add to that the fact that the movie is actually quite good, and it’s something of a miracle. Perhaps it’s too by-the-books and too sterile in its approach, but I think it’s going to age better in the long run for that.