What Breaks the Ice

It's a great first hour of character building and acting. Super enjoyable drama and coming of age story. Once they introduce the lady detective the movie turns into a flaming pile of poop.

Why do writers want to force emotion and drama and use bad premises to do it. It's just crap man. The 2 lead actors are great and the first hour is also, but the last third ruin the entire movie and I can't give it a good rating. The end.

Writer/Director Rebecca Eskreis set out to leverage a suspense tale off the well-worn townie-vs-tourist theme, and pretty much succeeds. In a period where all the A-listers are now working in the streaming world, competent little films like this one are no longer quite as common as they used to be, with "new lows" being set daily in the indie world. Not only do the two young leads work well together, but Hublitz (of Ozarks fame) shows an authenticity that reminds one of a young Laura Dern, with a very promising career ahead. Thumps up.

A wealthy girl comes to vacation and befriends a townie with issues. They spend most of the time partying, drinking and hanging out with boys. An incident happens, and they struggle to over come it and it ends with a very unrealistic ending. A pretty boring and pointless movie.

As "What Breaks The Ice" (2021 release; 99 min.) opens, we are in Cold Spring Village, NY and summer has just begun, when the place receives all of the Manhattan families for the summer. A local girl, Sammy, strikes up a conversation with a Manhattan girl, Emily, and they hit it off. It's not long before they become BFFs, even though there is significant economy disparity between their respective families... At this point we're 10 minutes into the film.

Couple of comments: this is the feature-length debut from writer-director Rebecca Eskreis. (Even more noticeably, when the movie's end credits rolled, every single important position within the film's production and post-production is filled by a woman.) There are several familiar themes in this film, including the "coming of age" of two 15 yr old girls, the economic disparity between the 'poor' local girl and 'rich' out of town girl, etc. But the film does steer away from the predictable when about 40 min. Into it, there is an incident. OF course I'm not going to spoil what the incident is, but suffice to say that the impact on the two girls is enormous. Sofia Hublitz ("Ozarks"), who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Laura Dern, is outstanding as Sammy. Madelyne Cline (as Emily) looks a bit too old for a 15 yr old character. But in the end, what kept my attention in this film is the wonderful story-telling by Eskreis. Check out the scene late in the movie when a local female cop relays a story from her youth to Sammy. Just beautiful.

When the end credit rolled, the film has a 2019 copyright notice. I'm guessing its release was delayed multiple times due to COVID. "What Breaks the Ice" recently started streaming in Showtime, and is now available on SHO On Demand and SHO Anytime, where i caught it the other night. If you are in the mood for a coming of age story that comes with a different twist, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

I though the movie was good. Decent plot line and edge to it. The writers could have done better to explain what was actually happening vs what the characters believed and knew. But the actresses played it well and if you pay enough attention yourself it's easy to get it.