Tomas Alfredson ain’t prolific, but he sure is good at what he does. It’s been six years since the Swedish director’s last film, the brilliantly slippery espionage yarn Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and before that, he put a novel spin on the vampire flick with the gentle, poetic Let the Right One In. The news of another project from the elusive filmmaker is cause for great commotion, and the newly revealed trailer for that film — frost-choked serial killer thriller The Snowman — reminds us why. It has a lot to do with snow, and a lot to do with Michael Fassbender.

He plays Harry Hole, a detective hot on the trail of a cold-blooded murderer. The so-called ‘Snowman Killer’ has made a habit of mangling women and leaving their bodies inside Frosty lookalikes, sans fingerprints or craniums. It’s up to Harry to track the culprit down, before he ends up as the next victim. (“He’s been watching us the whole time!” is the most unsettling moment in an unsettling trailer.) Fassbender gets backup in the cast from Rebecca Ferguson, J.K. Simmons, Chloe Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Val Kilmer, who’s been on something of a roll lately.

Alfredson is poised to re-assert his supremacy as a genre chameleon with a crime saga that looks something like David Fincher’s take on Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, or Silence of the Lambs at zero degrees Fahrenheit. The photography is sterile, cleanly-composed, chilling. We’ll get a fuller look at the film when it debuts on October 20, and you can be sure that this is near the top of most Toronto International Film Festival attendees’ wish lists. Winter is coming.

More From Mix 97.9 FM