There’s lots of imagery to digest in “Ice Blue”: a woman floating lyrically underwater, dead beavers, a teen screaming in a moonlit forest, a child glaring at us from the back window of a car as it sinks into a lake. It all eventually makes sense as 16-year-old Arielle (Sophia Lauchlin Hirt) untangles a series of forbidden relationships.
Arielle and her father John (Billy MacLellan) live on an isolated foothills farm breeding beavers. The small animals play a tangential role at best, so you need to stop worrying about the furry little critters and concentrate on the story.
Home-schooled Arielle has few friends and relies on her loving father to comfort her. She befriends bad boy Christian (Charlie Kerr) who feeds her bits and pieces of what really went on with her mother and what’s currently going on with her father. As the teens she encounters at parties add more pieces to the puzzle, Arielle begins to question the “be straight with each other” relationship with her father.
Complicating matters further is John’s relationship with Elizabeth (Dawn Van de Schoot), brought on by Elizabeth’s husband’s relationship with Maria, which in turn eventually leads to the Christian-Arielle relationship. This Mobius strip of forbidden relationships underpins the tragedy of “Ice Blue” and its flawed characters.
Adding to Arielle’s confusion, her long-estranged mother Maria (Michelle Morgan) mysteriously appears after a 10-year absence. Maria comforts and warns her to leave her father and the farm. “This place is killing you,” says Maria as she braids Arielle’s hair to one side to mimic her hairstyle.
Penned by Jason Long and helmed by Sandi Somers, “Ice Blue” is often burdened by too many moving parts: teen angst, maternal abandonment, father-daughter mistrust, a bad-boy relationship, attempted murder, actual murder, and poisoned beavers.
That said, the film does a good job of delineating many of these issues. It confronts the dilemma of attaching yourself to one person, who seemingly betrays you, only to discover the tragic lie that’s behind the betrayal. When Arielle finally unravels the lies and betrayals, she takes matters into her own hands, which propels the story to its dénouement.
The dusk and dawn dark forest footage give the film a squeamish ambiance and there’s no shortage of subsonic rumblings that every thriller needs these days.
Alex A. Kecskes is a published author of "Healer a Novel" and "The Search for Dr. Noble"—both now available on Amazon. He has written hundreds of film reviews and celebrity interviews for a wide variety of online and print outlets. He has covered red carpet premieres and Comic-Con events for major films and independent releases.
