By Joshua Knopp/reporter

The scariest monster is a common grey wolf. The most explicit gore is a broken bone. But Frozen is riveting.

At face value, the film starts with three friends at a ski resort looking for kicks. After bribing one of the workers, they manage to get onto the ski lift for an extremely late run, but through errors of miscommunication, they become trapped. They are too high to jump, and with bad weather coming in, the lift turns into a pretty bad spot.

However, looking deeper, the film starts with something much more important — character development. Through dialogue between the characters, the audience becomes familiar with them as individuals and their group dynamic in a matter of minutes.

This dynamic carries the film. Through the middle and closing acts, the only people for miles are the three main characters. With this extended isolation in a realistic setting, the filmmakers don’t have the option of flashy special effects, contrived plot twists or Jason appearing and killing someone in an unnecessarily gore-filled manner. Without these, the focus turns to plot, dialogue and acting, and with all three being extremely well-done, this becomes a great film.

With no tangible antagonist and mild-at-most gore, this film is a triumph of suspense-driven horrors a la The Silence of the Lambs and the 1930s Dracula against over-the-top torture movies, such as the Saw and Hostel films, that have dominated the past decade.