Andrew Haigh premieres 1950s Colorado drama A Long Winter at Telluride

Adaptation from the Pyrenees to the Rockies

Director Andrew Haigh presented his new feature drama, A Long Winter, at the Telluride Film Festival. The film adapts a 2006 novella by Irish author Colm Tóibín, which first appeared in his short story collection Mothers and Sons before being reissued as a standalone book in 2025. Haigh, who acquired the screen rights nearly two decades ago before directing Weekend, relocated the setting from the 1930s Spanish Pyrenees to the Colorado Rocky Mountains in 1951. Just as Haigh previously transposed a Japanese novel to London for his 2023 film All of Us Strangers, this adaptation reimagines Tóibín's European story as a piece of mid-century rural Americana. Cinematographer André Turpin filmed the production across high-altitude landscapes, capturing the transition from autumn into a protracted, snowbound mountain season.

Mountain farmstead and family fractures

The narrative centers on Mikey, portrayed by Fred Hechinger, a diffident young man who returns to his family's isolated cabin after a brief attempt at farm life two state lines away in Idaho. The family sustains itself by raising chickens and breeding rabbits for meat and pelts following the shutdown of the local mine. Domestic stability erodes when Mikey's younger brother Tommy, played by Kit Connor, enlists in the United States Army and prepares to ship out to Korea. Their mother Louise, played by Caitríona Balfe, endures depression and concealed alcoholism while listening to LP records and longing for wider cultural connection. Mikey secretly helps her by smuggling copies of Cosmopolitan magazine among supplies purchased on trips to a depressed foothills township in their wood-sided Ford station wagon.

Disappearance and shifting domestic ties

Household tensions escalate when her husband Lester, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, discovers Louise's alcohol stash after smelling wine on her breath. Lester, whose own father and grandfather died of alcoholism, has grown hardened and boorish, abandoning earlier artistic pursuits such as furniture-making and playing the mandolin. Following an explosive dispute over the hidden alcohol, Louise vanishes into the freezing wilderness during a severe winter storm. Local police officers and search-party volunteers halt their efforts, explaining that the search can only resume when the heavy snowpack melts in the spring. Lester subsequently hires Jimmy, a local biracial youth played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, to perform household chores and cooking, subjecting the newcomer to homophobic hostility while Mikey experiences quiet romantic feelings toward him.

Critical reception at Telluride

Initial reviews following the Telluride screening emphasize the film's austere tone, deliberate pacing, and visual composition. Commentators observe that Turpin's camera work balances the forbidding scale of the Rocky Mountains with the suffocating domestic atmosphere inside the cabin. Hechinger's understated performance provides a central emotional anchor, conveying the character's repressed desires and quiet resilience. Moss-Bachrach, Balfe, Connor, and Woon-A-Tai also earned recognition for their nuanced characterizations of a family navigating grief and survival in early 1950s America. The drama stands as an intimate character study of isolation, grief, and emergent queer identity within an unforgiving winter setting.