Nobody asked for an English-language remake of Force Majeure, the painfully well-observed 2014 comic drama from Swedish director Ruben Östlund. But if you have to remake it, you might as well lump for the kind of talent that Downhill boasts. There’s Peep Show/Succession creator Jesse Armstrong as co-writer; indie darlings Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Way, Way Back) on directing duties; and comedy royalty in Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing a married couple on a family skiing holiday that goes spectacularly wrong.
It’s an enviable roster, and while the remake never quite escapes the snowy shadow of its source, there’s still a lot to admire. For a start, it is not exactly the film you might expect from these two actors — or even from the trailers, which promised a bog-standard goofy chucklefest. The laughs, when they come, are muted, icy and deeply passive aggressive. It’s a comedy relying almost entirely on marital tension.
We already knew Louis-Dreyfus was a god-level performer, but if you needed further proof, take this film.
This frosty-in-every-sense environment makes very different demands of the two leads — especially Ferrell, who hasn’t been this restrained since 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction. His character, the ultimate Embarrassing Dad, is lightly clueless from the outset. It’s only when the physically harmless but emotionally catastrophic avalanche hits (much has changed in the transfer, but that moment is extremely faithful to the original) that he becomes like a cornered animal, unable to stop burrowing deeper holes for himself with terrible choices and worse lies.
If he’s the childlike, emotionally idiotic almost-villain of the piece, Louis-Dreyfus’ mum is the film’s heart, a constant source of sensible pathos and relatable exasperation. Left half-traumatised by the avalanche, she puts on a brave face until the stuff left unsaid becomes too much left unsaid. Her palpable jumble of rage and sadness is heart-stoppingly well-played. It all spills out in a scene so excruciatingly awkward that your toes may fully curl back into the soles of your feet. We already knew Louis-Dreyfus was a god-level performer, but if you needed further proof, take this film.
The strength of the film lies in these two central performances, and in the simple beauty of the Alps (“We’re in a stock image right now,” observes one character). But it suffers a little outside of that core duo. The Americanisation of the story leads to some fairly cheap fish-out-of-water tourist gags. Two Eurotrash caricatures, in particular — a sexually liberated hotel rep and a hunky ski instructor — feel like they’ve skied in from a different film, given all the restraint shown elsewhere. The ending of the original film is stranger and more nuanced, too, leaving things on a bittersweet, ambiguous note. Downhill dodges that ambiguity for something more conventional. If you’re unfamiliar with the first film, though, you may find more to favour.
