The American | Östersund & the Frozen Lakes of Jämtland — Where the Snow Goes Red

The film opens without a word of explanation. Snow to the horizon, a lake locked under ice, a cabin, and a man who has been happy for about four minutes. Then Jack turns, and the woman beside him is dead, and the man who came for him is dead, and so is the last version of himself he could have lived with.

Anton Corbijn shot that sequence in Jämtland, in the far north of Sweden, and he shot it last — five days in January 2010, after the Italian unit had wrapped. The order matters. He wanted the cold in the audience's body before Abruzzo's stone and sun arrived, so the warmth would feel borrowed rather than earned. The production based itself in Östersund, on the shore of Storsjön, chosen over locations further south for deeper snow and fewer filming restrictions.

Storsjön freezes hard most winters, hard enough to carry skate tracks and ploughed ice roads, and the town keeps living out on it: skaters, anglers hunched over augered holes, dogs off the leash. Nothing here is marked. No plaque in Jämtland mentions George Clooney.

Go in February, walk out onto the lake ice until the shoreline lights go small, and the choice explains itself. The horizon offers no cover at all. On a plain that white, a man who kills for a living is the only dark thing for a kilometre.

Photo: Isak Fransson via Pexels (Pexels licence).