Snow Cake

---Snow Cake (2007) is a Toronto Film Festival film directed by Mark Evans. It contains the well known actors/actresses Alan Rickman (Harry Potter...) as the main character, Sigourney Weaver (Alien) as an autistic mother, and Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) as her neighbor next door. The visual characteristics of this film are centered around the characters.

---Rickman plays Alex Hughes, a troubled and lonely man driving to Winnepeg to meet with "an old friend". On his way, he stops by a diner and the daughter of the autistic woman plops herself in front of him, begging for a ride. Despite her dark makeup and gothic clothes, Vivienne is surprisingly bright. She cheerfully announces to him that she is planning to write a book on one of the darkest horrors of humanity... only she hasn't decided which. Vivienne dies in the next scene, but her character continues to live on as Alex tracks down her mother and learns more and more about them both.

---It is a crisp cold winter outside the autistic woman's (Linda's) impeccibly clean home. Snow globes litter the shelves, one with Vivienne's picture in it. The colours are clean and well defined in every scene throughout the movie. The scenes transition smoothly from one to the next. As both of them, as well as Vivienne's grandparents (who mostly raised her), prepare for the funeral, the movie slowly reveals little things about each character through short, simple scenes. For example, the truck driver that hit Alex's car and killed Vivienne comes to Linda's door and meets Alex. At the end of this scene, Alex runs away. About ten or fifteen minutes later in the movie, this is all explained.

---There's a neat scene at the very end, where a section of the kitchen counter, labelled "Alex's Space" is cleaned off. It merely shows each item disappering without anyone moving them.

---One of the main characteristics in this movie, is the unique way in how it shows Linda's grief. I don't want to give anything away, but despite first appearances, she does grieve for he daughter deeply.