The title is a clever double-meaning (temperature + degrees of separation from safety), but the movie never warms up. Skip it.
Pregnant American author Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez) and her husband Matt (Vincent Piazza) wake up buried under snow. The doors are frozen shut, the engine is dead, and they have no cell service. It’s a nightmare scenario.
The movie is 90 minutes of people arguing in a cramped Subaru. What could have been a claustrophobic masterpiece (think Buried but with icicles) becomes a repetitive cycle of: wake up, panic, try to dig out, fail, fight, cry, repeat. The pacing is glacial—pun intended.
Centigrade is cold, slow, and ultimately forgettable. Stream it only if you need a cinematic sleeping aid. For a real chiller, watch The Revenant or Fargo instead.
The logic gaps are maddening. Why don’t they break a window immediately? How do their phones keep having battery for weeks? The dialogue is stiff, and the husband’s character is written as such a stubborn liability that you stop rooting for their survival.
Rating: ⭐½ (2/5)
Genesis Rodriguez gives a physically committed performance. Her desperation feels real, even when the script fails her. The sound design (the groan of crushing ice, the hiss of carbon monoxide) is occasionally effective. And at 89 minutes, it’s mercifully short.
If Centigrade wanted to prove that watching a couple freeze to death in a car is as tedious as it sounds, it succeeded. The film, directed by Brendan Walsh, takes a harrowing true story—a young couple trapped in their vehicle during a blizzard in Norway—and manages to suck every ounce of tension out of it.
