Wind Chill is a 2007 supernatural horror directed by Gregory Jacobs and written by Joe Gangemi and Steven A. Katz, starring Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes as two university students sharing a ride home for the Christmas break who end up stranded in a snowbank on a remote highway. Martin Donovan appears as the ghost of a highway patrolman. It holds a forty-four percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus describes it as a ghost story with a clunky and unpolished script that fails to sustain suspense. I would go further than that.

Let me begin with the problem I never got past. This man could not work up the courage to ask a woman on a date, so instead he lied about where he lived, engineered a rideshare, and arranged to be alone in a vehicle with her for six hours. That is not a meet-cute. That is a plan. A critic at the time described him, accurately, as grade A stalker material, and a viewer summarised my own position better than I could by objecting flatly that the redemption arc is unacceptable because he is still a creep.

Because the film does attempt a redemption arc. Having established that he deceived her and inserted himself into her life under false pretences, it gradually repositions him as a decent, wounded young man whose intentions were essentially good. And I could not accept it. Is that redemption? Is it Stockholm syndrome? She is trapped in a freezing car with the only other human being for miles, and she softens towards him, which is not character development. That is proximity and the early stages of hypothermia.

Then the film loses interest in that entirely and becomes something else. Rather than a story about a dangerous man and a woman who cannot escape him, which is a genuinely strong premise, it transforms into a ghost story. We are given the spectral remains of a 1950s highway patrolman, who committed murders on that stretch of road, and also, for reasons that are never adequately explained, a group of ghostly priests.

And here is my favourite structural problem. The ghost cop's method is freezing people to death. In a blizzard. In sub-zero temperatures, in a snowstorm, where the two protagonists are already at genuine risk of freezing to death without any supernatural assistance whatsoever. It is like introducing a villain whose power is making things slightly damp and then setting your film during a flood. The weather is already doing his job, and considerably more efficiently.

He also appears to move through time, which is because the woods exist in a loop, and the film is built explicitly on Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, the idea that all events are condemned to repeat infinitely. That is genuinely the intellectual scaffolding here. It is referenced directly. And I have no objection to a horror film reaching for philosophy, but you have to earn it, and a film cannot arrive at eternal recurrence via ghost priests and a man who freezes people during a snowstorm.