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Trailer for "First Snow"

Guy Pearce is in virtually every scene of Mark Fergus’ First Snow, which is fortunate for Fergus, and for you if you’re going to be seeing this mostly nifty little potboiler. Pearce gives most of these scenes a charged energy and, increasingly, a sense of emotional depth you don’t often encounter in genre movies.

He plays Jimmy Starks (has someone been thinking too much about Rebel Without a Cause’s Jim Stark?), a 30-something flooring salesman in exurban Albuquerque. Starks is an amiably slick operator, a rather obvious but disarmingly glib schmoozer. Pearce’s sleek, angular, attractively pared-down presence and slightly tensed affability are almost immediately persuasive.

Out on the job in New Mexico’s flat and mountain-framed expanses, Jimmy has to kill time while his car is being repaired. For a kick, he visits a fortune teller (J.K. Simmons). What he hears, or, more accurately, doesn’t hear, annoys him. The soothsayer offers a couple of pleasantly innocuous predictions and then, seemingly startled, breaks off the session and refunds Jimmy’s money. His mild annoyance and vague unease give way to disquiet and anxiety he can’t laugh off when this commercial shaman’s predictions, including an unlikely basketball victory, seem to be accurate. And they coincide with news that a boyhood friend, who has been serving time for a criminal enterprise they both organized, is out and may be responsible for threatening messages.

Jimmy returns to the seer and forces him to reveal what he saw: “…no more roads, no more tomorrows.” He has, he’s told, at least until the first snow.

His unease now congealed into a cold, growing fear, Jimmy fretfully casts about for a way to disprove or shake off this doomful forecast. He undertakes to stalk the man from his past whom he fears has been stalking him. And he winds up driving away his pretty, committed, semi-live-in girlfriend (Piper Perabo in a part that really doesn’t test her skills).

In his debut as a director, Fergus is a smooth operator himself, keeping tight control of his movie. First Snow offers up a series of nicely shaped, well-observed scenes and fluently combined sequences. Fergus gradually increases the tension, never interrupting things for a slam-bang effect. His sure, gradualistic approach gives the movie much of its ominously involving tone.

Pearce’s performance and Fergus’ use of him are central to First Snow’s quietly creepy atmospherics. The movie is supposed to reflect Jimmy’s point of view, so Pearce has to bear a lot of the burden of making it all work. Despite the reputation of the decidedly offbeat Memento, the Aussie remains one of the more underrated and underutilized leading actors in American films. He was last seen as a repellently cartoonish Andy Warhol in Factory Girl, but his talent and range, his adeptness, are much more evident in this one. He lends Jimmy, the smart operator, a human dimension and something like a tragic aspect that are rare in this kind of vehicle.

It’s probably a mistake to ponder the mysteries of human existence on the basis of a movie like this one. It’s much too limited by its B-movie metaphysics and abrupt plot turns. First Snow is really an effectively remodeled version of the many bottom-of-the-bill productions of the 1940s and 1950s, at least the better ones, like Rudolf Maté’s D.O.A. It’s a clever throwback to the mostly cruder movies of that era that the restlessly ambitious, aesthetically slumming young French cineastes of the New Wave paid sometimes backhanded homage to 40 to 50 years ago (although they would probably have found it too aesthetic to copy).

It’s probably coincidence that the voiceover message at the very beginning of the movie echoes the epigraph to John O’Hara’s much more serious, very dissimilar 1934 novel, Appointment in Samarra. But Fergus is using a sort of prefab hook, and a rather too neatly schematic resolution for his film. The cleverness has worked just a little thin by then.

First Snow lacks the emotional resonance and sympathy of another recent suspenseful film by a first-time director, Scott Frank’s The Lookout. And Fergus definitely wasn’t trying to follow the steps of pop recyclers from Truffaut to Tarantino. But he did most of what he set out to do.