Snow Cake

Snow Cake centres on Alex Hughes, a reserved Englishman travelling through a snowbound part of Ontario. He gives a lift to a young hitchhiker, Vivienne, and a road accident follows in which she is killed. Carrying the weight of what happened, Alex seeks out her mother, Linda, to tell her. Linda is autistic and does not express grief in the ways he expects, so Alex stays on in the town while her parents travel there for the funeral. Over the following days he becomes part of her daily life and also grows close to her neighbour Maggie, a woman who keeps her own feelings at a distance. Marc Evans directed the film, released in 2006, from a screenplay by Angela Pell; it followed his 2004 feature Trauma and came well before Mr. Burton and Effi o Blaenau. Alan Rickman plays Alex and Sigourney Weaver plays Linda, with Carrie-Anne Moss as Maggie, Emily Hampshire as Vivienne and James Allodi and Janet van de Graaf in supporting roles. The production had a budget of about 12 million dollars and took roughly 1 million dollars worldwide, a large shortfall. Audience responses are favourable, with 7.4 out of 10 on IMDb from around 14,000 votes and 7.1 out of 10 on TMDB, while the critics' rating stands at 6.4 out of 10 from 62 reviews, lower than the audience scores.