In Cold Light: Noir Drama About an Alberta Drug Dealer in Over Her Head is Cold Indeed

By Liz Braun

Rating: B-

Maxime Giroux’s In Cold Light is a noirish drama about a drug dealer who’s in over her head. 

Ava (Maika Monroe) is high on her own supply when she’s caught in an FBI drug raid and sent off to prison. Two years later she’s released, and upon returning home makes it clear to her twin brother (Jesse Irving) that she wants to resume her old leadership role in their drug business. 

Maika Monroe as the drug-dealing Ava in In Cold Light

She has a bad feeling she was set up for the prison stint.

Ava works a menial job at the Ponoka Stampede — we’re in rural Alberta — and has some long-standing issues with her father (Troy Kotsur), a former rodeo champ. Ava’s father is deaf, and so everyone in the family can sign; early on, there is an impressive emotional scene between Kotsura and Monroe in which not a word is spoken, and both actors are excellent. Problem is, the emotional stuff is never really developed, so that scene and a few others are more confusing than illuminating. 

Ava goes out on a drug run with her brother. The cops show up, there’s a shooting, and thereafter Ava is a woman with a target on her back. She’s on the run. The tension is terrific.

In one particularly hallucinatory drive fleeing the cops, she ends up back at her childhood home, badly wounded, disoriented, and looking for her dead mother — the current owners of the house call an ambulance. 

On another drive, high this time, Ava has a happy vision of the future involving her young niece and her father. But never mind all that. Ava has to get a gun, return to her old apartment, take a bad guy hostage, cross paths with the formidable Claire (Helen Hunt), who is the queen bee of the area’s drug business and generally sort out the future for her family. 

None of it makes any sense, alas, and you’ll stop caring about what happens or who it happens to, fairly early on. There seems to be a lot of pseudo-Freudian yammer in the middle of this crime drama, or perhaps there’s a lot of drug-trade-related violence in the middle of a psychological family study; either way, it’s mystifying as hell. 

It looks good though, courtesy of cinematographer Sara Mishara.

In Cold Light. Directed by Maxime Giroux, written by Patrick Whistler, starring Maika Monroe, Troy Kotsur, Helen Hunt. In theatres February 27.