A 66-year-old two-time Oscar winner who’s still near the height of her powers and has presumably made enough money for her grandkids to retire at birth, Emma Thompson could spend the rest of her life guest-starring on British TV shows and sleeping in her own bed at night and no one would think any less of her. But actors have to act (we love them for that, and that for them), and even a screen icon of Thompson’s cachet is powerless to pass up the prospect of saying dialogue like “Freakin’ fiddlesticks shitBUNS!” in a Marge Gunderson-thick Brainerd accent.

So while the rest of us might have been happy to stay warm at home, Thompson hoofed it out to the snowy wilds of Finland in order to film “Dead of Winter,” a programmatic but tightly plotted thriller — set amidst a brutal Minnesota blizzard — in which she plays a widowed ice fisher who asks the wrong guy for directions on the way to a certain lake (he’s not quite in the middle of feeding a human body into a wood chipper, but he might as well be). Hardly a scene goes by where Thompson isn’t beaten, chased, and/or shot at in sub-zero temperatures, but you get the sense that all of the frostbite in the world couldn’t have stopped her from getting her own little taste of “Fargo.” 

That passion — that enduring sense of purpose — is reflected across the course of a small but satisfying movie about people who are either desperate for something to live for, or living only for their desperation. If only they could find a way forward for themselves. Barb Sorenson (Thompson) is looking for precisely that when she heads out into the cold for a day on the ice. All “Minnesota nice” and quiet sorrow, she planned to start her search at a fishing spot that was especially meaningful to her late husband; the only problem is that she can’t find it. 

So she asks Camo Jacket — as Marc Menchaca’s oafishly menacing character is identified in the credits — to point her in the right direction, even though he doesn’t seem like the most trustworthy fella. Minutes later, after Barb’s truck breaks down, she watches Camo Jacket hunt down and hand-tie a young woman (Laurel Madsen) who escaped from his house. In lieu of anything else to do with herself, Barb decides to intervene. But sneaking into Camo Jacket’s basement and stealing the girl won’t be easy, because Camo Jacket is married to Purple Lady (played by a rifle-toting Judy Greer, a fentanyl lollipop always lodged in her mouth), and she isn’t quite as helpless as her husband. 

Directing from a lean and functional script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, Brian Kirk (“21 Bridges”) maneuvers these four characters around each other with care and a clear eye for tension. The action is taut, the stakes are clear, and Kirk never misses a chance to remind us that all of these are just regular people who’ve crossed paths in a dark place. These are humble Americans more accustomed to baiting fish than shooting humans, and while that may not excuse all of the thriller cliches this movie indulges when push comes to shove during its do-or-die third act (i.e. someone running out of ammo right when they’ve lined up a certain kill shot), every Coen brothers-esque blunder reinforces the idea that these characters have been forcibly diverted from the lives they were meant to live.

To that end, the movie’s greatest conflict might be that between their folksy earnestness and their flinty desperation, and it’s a conflict that every member of the cast is able to articulate within themselves without resorting to caricature. The mystery as to why Purple Lady and Camo Jacket have kidnapped a suicidal woman is too opaque at first (something to do with organ harvesting, it seems?), and then too impractical by the end (she’s getting a doctor to do what?), but Greer always shines as a self-interested villain, and she manages to sell the absolute shit out of an unscrupulous woman who’s doing what she has to in order to survive. You may not believe in the full scope of her character’s circumstances, but not for a second will you doubt the wincing sincerity of her “sorry, not sorry” attitude toward saving her own skin. 

Greer’s Purple Jacket makes a terrific foil for Thompson’s Barb, whose “aw shucks” affect is pointed towards risking her life for a perfect stranger. Recurring flashbacks — in which a younger Barb is embodied by Thompson’s own daughter Gaia Wise — do more to disrupt the film’s suspense than to meaningfully complicate its protagonist, but the most impactful of these glimpses into her marriage offer some insight into the various roles she hoped to play over the course of her life (wife, mother, entrepreneur, etc.), and hint at the difficulties that have come from being recast against her will.

If Thompson exudes too much tenacity for us to need such labored glimpses into her character’s past, the extra insight makes it that much easier to buy her character’s transformation into a badass good Samaritan, and “Dead of Winter” never loses sight of what its backwoods shenanigans mean to Barb on a deeper level. People will do anything to survive, but a life without purpose can be worse than death; watching Emma Thompson bleed, shiver, and shoot her way through a movie this cold is proof enough of that.

Grade: B-

Vertical Entertainment will release “Dead of Winter” in theaters on Friday, September 26.

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