We meet our protagonists, appropriately enough, at the base of the ski lift as they try to bribe the operator into giving them a discount ride. They’re broke college students: a confident, natural leader (Kevin Zegers), his sheltered girlfriend (Emma Bell), and his insecure best friend (Shawn Ashmore). After spending a few hours bonding and bickering on the slopes and the ski lift, the trio head out at dusk for one last trip down the mountain, just as the park is closing. They beg the ski lift operator to bend the rules for them, and joyfully pile on the creaky ski lift. But then, as it must, a misunderstanding occurs when the lift operator they’ve bribed gets called away, only to tell his replacement to turn off the lift after “the last three” have made their way down. A different trio of skiers is spotted returning down the slopes, and the ski lift is turned off. It’s not entirely implausible, and doesn’t break suspension of disbelief (as these obligatory set-ups usually do).

Once the ski lift stops in mid-air, the three friends quickly realize – as the lights turn off around them – that something might be wrong. A blizzard sets in, and it becomes clear they have been forgotten. That the resort will be closed for an entire week is reinforced by a panicking character’s dialogue, and the situation is deadly clear: for any chance at survival, they must try to find a way down from the lift, and from there, a way back to civilization.

The film works when someone is actively working towards escaping, not so much when they sit and talk about escaping, which is unfortunately about a third of the time in the chair lift. The final scenes also lack a climatic punch, eclipsed by the drama that has already occurred. This isn’t to say it isn’t satisfying as a conclusion; merely that the film’s strongest, most gruesome scene happens too early in the film, and nothing tops it after that. But the script gets credit for making an almost unbelievable scenario feel the logical result of a few unfortunate coincidences, and this commonplace set-up heightens the suspense of everything that follows in Frozen.

The characters are everyday, somewhat bland college students. They avoid being as annoying as most horror film protagonists, and at moments come near likable before settling back into the forgettable, generic tools required to advance the situation. The performances by the three leads – Kevin Zegers, Emma Bell, and Shawn Ashmore – are believable, and surpass the stilted performances of minor characters like the lift operator, played by Ed Ackerman as a stone-faced resort drone.

But the film would have been much better with a different set of skiers. For instance, the drama of the survival would have been increased exponentially if, rather than a trio of college friends pitted against nature, it had been a family of three stranded on the lift instead. It changes the thought experiment from “What would you do if you were trapped on a ski lift?” to “What would you do if your family was trapped on a ski lift?” After all, watching your mother freeze to death would be much more horrific than possibly loosing a good friend to the cold.

Like the plot, the cinematography becomes more effective once the trio is trapped in the ski lift. A ski lift suspended in the night above a snowy mountain may seem to limit the shot variety, but this minimalist setting enhances the sense of isolation within a barren, icy wilderness. As the film progresses, the once threatening gears and towers of the lift are covered with ice, and we get the sense that when abandoned, man and his machines are insignificant and vulnerable to a harsh, indifferent Nature.

An early montage of the college friends skiing is set to the rock music of a modern band (in fact, director Adam Green’s own band), and we worry that the rest of the film might this disposable. But as soon as the skiers are abandoned in the wild, the score changes: now we get not contemporary hits, but melancholic violins and looming instrumentation. This further separates the two worlds of the film, and while neither the modern nor classical instrumental are exceptional, they’re used to good effect.

Frozen doesn’t rely on CGI for its effects; there are no green screens or studios; all the actors are actually in the cold, suspended in a ski lift at a perilous height. When wolves attack, they’re real wolves. (Sure, trained wolves, but real nonetheless.) This realism adds immensely to the tension of the film, and is necessary to ground the all but outlandish premise. The few scenes of gore in the film are graphic and rightfully shocking in their execution, but hardly gratuitous, and nothing that a person accustomed to horror films couldn’t handle.