Seemingly triggered by snowfall, a serial killer is kidnapping women across Norway’s cities, leaving their dismembered bodies to be found lying face down in a drift several days later. The killer’s calling card: a snowman in the victim’s front garden, usually oriented to face the house. To crack the case, Hole joins forces with new recruit Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson). The cast, at least, is sterling stuff: alongside Fassbender and Ferguson you’ll find JK Simmons, Val Kilmer, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chloe Sevigny and Toby Jones in supporting roles. The problem is, the screenplay, credited to Hossein Amini (Drive, The Two Faces Of January) and Peter Straughan, fails to give any of them much to do. Sevigny’s briefly glimpsed in a shed full of chickens; Gainsbourg’s trapped in a thankless role as Hole’s estranged wife, Rakel; Jones is a cop with a comb-over; Simmons smiles wanly through the faintly embarrassing part of a lecherous industrialist. Kilmer, evidently still recovering from an illness, cuts a sad, sickly figure here, and what little dialogue he has is very obviously looped after the fact. Then again, the whole production smacks of trouble behind the scenes. The opening credits list the eminent Thelma Schoonmaker as editor; a startling sight to behold, given that The Snowman’s prologue is cut together with none of her coherence or finesse. IMDb, meanwhile, lists the editor as Claire Simpson, which suggests that a changing of the guard occurred at some point. Add in the news that The Snowman had a round of reshoots a year after its initial run of filming concluded, and there’s at least a bit of evidence that something went drastically wrong somewhere along the line. Alfredson’s turned in superb work in the past, but The Snowman feels like the work of a filmmaker whose project has somehow slipped through his fingers. The pace plods when it should build; would-be shock sequences involving severed limbs have a tendency to provoke titters (at least in our screening) rather than gasps of horror. The plot also diverges from the book in curious ways we can’t describe in detail; it’s perhaps sufficient to say that certain characters’ story threads feel so curtailed and disjointedly told that the film’s been heavily, hastily reworked at some point. Even composer Marco Beltrami seems out of sorts here: his score fills the gaps between the dialogue but adds little else – unless you count one scene where a Twilight Zone-style jingle plays as the camera zooms in on a severed limb, which is inadvertently hilarious. Cinematographer Dion Beebe at least captures the chilly atmosphere of Norway in winter – all empty white space and billowing licks of powdered snow. The rest of the film, we’re sad to report, soon dissolves like a snowball in front of a radiator.