A tightly-plotted and well-executed thriller that shows what can be done on a limited budget, especially with a dedicated cast prepared to go the extra mile – in fact many arduous extra miles through the snowy wastes and spectacular but desolate pine forests of British Columbia.
We meet Will (Jamie Bamber) lying in a hospital bed, his limbs bandaged, his face scarred. He asks a policewoman who arrives with questions for him, for news of his wife Dawn. Before she answers we flashback to 48 hours earlier, when Will and Dawn (Stefanie von Pfetten) arrive in a small Canadian town from their home in Vancouver – which we learn is threatened with foreclosure if Will doesn’t land a job he’s supposedly been promised. The reasons for their plight (involving a loan from Dawn’s father) are only briefly sketched in, as is the back-story of the hitch-hiking couple Lee (Aleks Paunovic) and his sister Cheryl (Marie Avgeropoulos) who Will and Dawn pick up on their way back to Vancouver – despite the audience inwardly screaming ‘Don’t!’
Both couples are in trouble: Will’s job didn’t materialise (though he hasn’t yet told Dawn) and Lee and the flaky Cheryl, badly-dressed for the falling snow, are headed who knows where. When Will knocks down an old man lurching into the road who then dies of hypothermia before they can get him to hospital, an admittedly foolhardy salvation seems at hand: the man’s wallet is stuffed with cash and two scribbled GPS co-ordinates on a scrap of paper.
The old man is the only survivor of a successful gold bullion robbery: the co-ordinates are the equivalent of a treasure map. Cheryl steals a sat-nav and for all Will’s more sensible instincts – he has a background in forestry and knows how ill-equipped they are for the venture – his financial desperation prevails and the four set off into the wilderness in search of the (quite possibly mythical) hidden gold.
What follows is a variation on THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (and more recently FARGO) where greed brings out the worst in characters we’re starting to care about, plunging them all into deadly peril. Will’s warning to Dawn that ‘we’re in a minefield’ comes true time and again, nowhere more than when a log cabin appears at a critical moment, offering warmth, food and comfort – until its owner appears, a backwoodsman straight out of DELIVERANCE, his presence a menace which helps fuel the tension of the last act. By this time Will has parted company with the others: saving their lives by making a cave out of snow overnight, he leaves his foot sticking out, and fearing losing it to frostbite, is forced to turn back.
The climax to NUMB is inevitable, but well directed by Jason R. Goode in his feature debut and believably acted as it is throughout by the hardy cast. A twist in the last moments of the film seems unnecessary, but perhaps not in the wider context of the story and its message that – in the words of Noah Cross in CHINATOWN – ‘at the right time and the right place, people are capable of anything’.