On a cold afternoon, with snow on the ground, a high school band in a small Pennsylvania town is practicing for the season’s last football game, when they hear gunshots while their teacher, Mr. Chervenick, is giving instructions. The film abruptly flashes back to a few weeks before, to a Chinese restaurant that employs a high school boy named Arthur, his ex-babysitter, Annie, and her best friend, Barb. Arthur, who's a bit of a misfit, has a troubled home life caused by his constantly clashing parents, both of whom often forget about him. Annie's life isn't faring much better: she's dealing with her ill mother, is separated from her husband, Glenn, and is now raising their young daughter, Tara, on her own. Glenn is now on the wagon and becoming a born-again Christian in order to prove that he is responsible enough to spend time with Tara. Depressed and lonely, Annie decides to betray her best friend by having an affair with Barb's husband, Nate, but finds that ruining Barb's life doesn’t make her own life any happier. Desperate to prove himself and still harboring deep feelings for his estranged wife, Glenn gets a new job and spends as much time as possible with Tara. Meanwhile, Arthur finds himself growing close to Lila, a new student at the high school who has a knack for photography. The film focuses heavily on how people's lives can cross in a small town, especially when Tara wanders out of the house and goes missing while Annie, drained over having meaninglessly destroyed her friendship with Barb and suffering from a bad cold, falls asleep on the couch. The whole town spends hours desperately searching for Tara, before Arthur finds her body while smoking pot with his friend. To everyone’s horror, Tara had fallen into open freezing water at the edge of the lake while playing and drowned, after which the open water froze over her. Glenn distraught over the death of his little girl, Tara, breaks into Annie's home with his shotgun and waits for her return. Upon Annie's return Glenn grabs her and forcibly washes her feet. Covering her mouth as she cries and screams at him, he drags a barefoot Annie by the collar into the snowy woods. With her kneeling, back turned to him, Glenn holds his gun to her head and tells her to say when she's ready. The movie presumably ends with their murder-suicide, explaining the shots heard before the flashback.
The film received generally positive reviews from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 68% approval rating with an average rating of 6.8/10 based on 110 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "With fine acting and considerable emotional depth, Snow Angels aptly captures the highs, and especially the lows of human relationships." Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 67 out of 100, based on 28 reviews. Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer called the film "a compelling, and grim, portrait of small-town lives gone wrong", "disturbingly good", while also writing, "the film's characters get inside your skin, your soul. It's enough to make you want to cry." Richard Corliss of Time wrote, "The film's success is due in large part to actors who are both faithful to all the social minutiae and seductive enough to keep you watching." He also praised director David Gordon Green for his gift, "to show how people learn codes of affection and aggression from watching movies, but when they try to pull them off in crucial situations they come out awkward, embarrassed and futile." The film appeared on some critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. Marc Mohan of The Oregonian named it the 4th best film of 2008, and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune named it the 8th best film of 2008. Among the critics who gave the film a negative review was Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, calling the film, "funny, beautifully written, nicely observed, sweetly familiar. For the first half", and felt, "the film's change of key in the second half feels like a betrayal."
Box office
The film opened in limited release in the United States on March 7, 2008 and grossed $14,247 in two theaters its opening weekend.
DVD release
released Snow Angels on DVD on September 16, 2008 on a single disc in widescreen and full screen versions.
