The Thaw
begins to illustrate the magnitude of those sacrifices by personalizing them.
For example the entrance of the Dr. Kruipen’s daughter Evelyn (Martha MacIsaac)
as one of three student interns chosen to work with the team amplifies the
force of Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist inclinations. We learn that Kruipen and
his daughter have conflicts associated with work and divorce that Evelyn hopes
to resolve. The film takes the time to explore how her father’s work and
absence result in both anger with and connection to him. Before her arrival at
the Arctic camp, for example, Evelyn declares to the other student interns,
“Honestly, I think that people are incapable of change, and their days are
numbered.” Despite his poor parenting skills, Kruipen attempts to stop Evelyn
from joining the team and being exposed to the parasites, suggesting that
personal connections could influence humans’ actions toward both human and
nonhuman nature.
The Thaw also draws on the suspense of the horror genre to
slowly expose the biological effects caused by parasites unleashed from the
prehistoric mammoth, displaying the monstrous results of their infestation in
both animals and humans. As Noel Murray of the A.V. Club declares, “The Thaw
sports some genuinely scary bug effects.” First the polar bear dies after
ingesting parasites from the Woolly Mammoth. Team members exposed to the
parasites start exhibiting symptoms of infection, and when Jane discovers
Kruipen’s plan, she shoots and wounds him and kills the other researchers to stop
the spread of the parasite, returns to camp and sabotages their helicopter.
When the student interns arrive at the base camp and find the rotting polar
bear carcass, they and their pilot Bart (Viv Leacock) also become infected with
horrific results.
In one scene, for example,
student researcher Ling Chen (Steph Song) is bitten after making love in a
sleeping bag. She declares, “it’s just a bug,” but the next day she is covered
with bites. Now quarantined in a base camp bed, Jane’s symptoms have also worsened.
Black bile comes out of her mouth as she tells everyone to leave. When they
examine Jane’s body, they find bug bites and eggs, and parasites begin to climb
out of her eye. Ling and the others suffer similar fates. Even when Bart chops
off his infected arm, the parasites linger. Seemingly immune, Evelyn wonders
“how long they stay in the larval state” and explains that they are prehistoric
infectious parasites that thawed with the ice.
Instead of the climate change
that unearthed deadly parasites, however, the film seems to suggest that the
real horror of the film is Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist plan. As evidence for
this connection between eco-terrorism and horror, Evelyn is appalled when she
discovers his scheme while watching her father’s video diary, hearing him
explain that he will expose others to the parasite, one of the horrors that
will come from global warming, because “no one cares.” She watches him cut
himself, providing an entry site for a parasite to bury itself quickly. Because
Evelyn has seen the ramifications of exposure to this deadly parasite, she
leaves her father to die in the base camp and returns home to warn scientists
and the American public about the horrific ramifications of Anthropogenic Era
climate change. “I used to believe that people couldn't change; that all we
could do is have as much fun as we could before it all came to an end. And now,
now I don't want it to end,” she explains, perhaps providing some hope until,
in the film’s last scene, a hunting dog finds a parasite-ridden bird near an
urban area.
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