Veteran supporting actor Lili Taylor gets a rare leading role.
When writer Eileen Crane (Lili Taylor) is awakened in the middle of the night to sounds of an intruder at the isolated lake house where she’s staying for the winter, she glances at the gun in her nightstand drawer but ultimately leaves it behind when she goes downstairs to confront the person ransacking her kitchen.
That says a lot about the protagonist of The Winter House, the latest film from writer-director Keith Boynton ’05E, although perhaps not in the way it seems at first. There are unexpected layers to Eileen that Boynton continues to reveal over the course of this melancholy, contemplative film, in small gestures like her decision not to take the gun, and in big, loud arguments between her and that intruder, a young man named Jesse (François Arnaud).
Jesse tells Eileen that he’s the son of the house’s owners, and that he didn’t expect anyone to be there over the winter, since the peak rental season is during the spring and summer. He doesn’t sound entirely convincing, but then again neither does Eileen when she says that she’s rented the house during the frigid off-season for the quiet and solitude as she works on her next book. Why did she bring a gun with her, and why does she know so much about what it would be like to drown in the ice-crusted lake?
She’s prickly with both the landlord and the shopkeeper in the nearby quaint New Hampshire town when they ask whether they might be familiar with the books she’s written, and she initially insists that Jesse leave her alone. But they’re both damaged people with secrets, and he can’t resist returning the next night, while she can’t resist letting him back in. They open up about their pasts, but it takes some time, and occasionally that opening up leads to more lies before the truth finally comes out.
Despite their age difference, they’re clearly drawn to each other, and The Winter House could play out like a Nicholas Sparks romance. Boynton is aiming for something more somber, though, taking on heavy themes of grief, addiction and regret as Eileen and Jesse face up to the personal demons that have brought them both to this stark, cold place. They eventually kindle enough passion to heat it up, but it’s the difficult, slow-building passion of two wary people who may not believe that they’re deserving of love.
There are some late-breaking thriller elements that force Eileen and Jesse closer together but aren’t fully developed, and the wry sense of humor that Boynton brought to his last two films, 2021’s The Scottish Play and 2017’s Seven Lovers, is missing. It’s replaced by a serious character study led by two strong performers, with veteran supporting player Taylor getting a rare showcase in a leading role. She makes the most of it, and Eileen is a fascinating character even when the plot around her gets a little thin.
“I didn’t want to die, exactly; I just didn’t want to be safe,” Eileen says late in the film, revisiting that early moment when she first encountered Jesse. It’s a complex approach to what could be depicted as a simple problem, and that’s how Boynton approaches all the drama in The Winter House. Jesse is alternately riveted and frustrated as he reads one of Eileen’s novels, interrogating her about her resistance to providing easy answers for her characters. He might have the same reaction to The Winter House, and it’s clear that Boynton, like Eileen, would be proud of provoking that kind of response.
Bell is a critic and writer based in Las Vegas.
Photo: Aitor Mendilbar, Courtesy of Winter House LLC