Director – Philip [Philippe] Setbon, Screenplay – Brad Lynch & Philip Setbon, Producer – Xavier Gelin, Photography – Dominique Brenguier, Music – Steve Levine, Special Effects – Georges Demetreau. Production Company – A.A.A. Productions/Hugo Films/Overseas Multi Media U.K. Ltd..
Cast
Jeff Goldblum (Mr Frost), Kathy Baker (Dr Sarah Day), Alan Bates (Felix Detweiler), Ronald Giraud (Professor Raymond Reynhardt), (Daniel Gelin (Simon Scolari), Francois Negret (Christopher Kovac), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Inspector Corelli), Vincent Schiavelli (Angelo)
Plot
Police inspector Felix Detweiler comes to talk to Mr Frost who calmly admits he has just buried a body. Mr Frost is arrested and 24 dead bodies are found buried on his property. However, Mr Frost remains an enigma – he refuses to speak in custody, while no record can be found as to his identity. After two years, he is transferred to a psychiatric facility and breaks his silence to speak, saying he will only talk to Sarah Day, one of the psychologists on the team. She tries to assess Mr Frost, who tells her that he is The Devil. He displays abilities to perform magic and influence the rest of the patients that may well bear this out. Sarah meets and finds an attraction to Felix, who is living in a monastery nearby, and is certain of Frost’s claims to be The Devil. Frost tells Sarah that he wants to make a statement about psychiatry having supplanted belief in God and The Devil by having her conduct the greatest sin for a psychiatrist – to kill him.
Mister Frost was a French/British film. It was the second film for Philippe Setbon, billed as the more Anglicised Philip Setbon, who had previously made the little-known crime film Cross (1987). Elsewhere Setbon has mostly worked as a director and writer in French tv. Mister Frost has gained an almost culty reputation – if the number of people asking me if I am going to write it up is anything to go by. This is also added to by the film’s obscurity – it is one of the few films from the VHS era not to have been released to dvd.
There has been a certain body of genre films about strange inmates in asylums. See the likes of The Sender (1982) and The Dark Red (2018) about inmates that are psychics; the alien visitors in Man Facing Southeast (1986) and K-Pax (2001); superheroes in Glass (2019) and The New Mutants (2020); and a mermaid whose tail has been cut off in Mermaid Down (2019). I have a more detailed overview of the genre and other such examples here at Asylums.
The film that Mister Frost most resembles is Man Facing Southeast, which came out four years earlier and featured a mysterious visitor in an asylum who claimed to be an alien and had a strange effect on the other inmates and likened himself to Christ. Here we similarly have an inmate claiming to be The Devil. Both films exist in an ambiguous place as to whether such claims can be believed or not.
Psychologist Kathy Baker and Jeff Goldblum as Mister Frost
Of course, Mister Frost also cannot help but look forward to the huge hit that came out the following year – The Silence of the Lambs (1991). It prefigures The Silence of the Lambs in its story about a woman going into interview a man incarcerated in an asylum who has been found guilty of killing many people but defies any easy pigeonholing or classification. In both films, at the same time as the inmate ridicules the self-important psychiatrists that try to analyse him, he takes a liking to the woman and weaves her into his game.
A great deal of the film hangs on Jeff Goldblum’s performance. Goldblum was at the height of his acclaim at the time and is at his most handsome, magnetic and charismatically charming here. His performance captivates from about the point that Alan Bates’ inspector comes to ask about a dead body and they share a cup of tea where Goldblum calmly states (in regard to the missing person’s body): “Yes, that’s what I was just burying when you arrived.”
Once Kathy Baker, an underrated actress who should have gone onto wider exposure, enters the scene, the dialogue between she and Goldblum becomes charged. The writing is sharp and intelligent as we see Mister Frost weaving his game with the staff and patients. The characters all end up being supremely well tuned, before the film reaches an undeniably affecting ending.
