Frozen City is a many-faceted tale of marital conflict that unfolds in the bleak winter of ice-encrusted Helsinki. Veli-Matti (Janne Virtanen) is a forlorn taxi driver who prowls the late-night streets of the city looking for fares. He seems to be the perfect nice guy when he’s with his children, even though his wife Hanna (Susanna Anteroinen) vanished when their youngest child was only a couple of months old. When she returns after an unexplained two-month absence, Veli-Matti realizes they cannot go on living together as if nothing had happened, so he suggests that he get his own apartment and they both move on with their lives. But misfortune continues to plague him. He fights for a fifty-fifty custody agreement, but his soon-to-be ex-wife wants a settlement that suits her better, even if she was the one who had abandoned the family in the first place. Veli-Matti tries to do what he can to be a father to his three young children despite a never-ending lack of time and resources and his actions play like a crash-course in low-budget single parenting. Next ,he loses his job and the courts soon ban him from having any contact with his children. When his crazy neighbor starts pounding on Veli-Matti’s door every single day to complain that the admittedly hideous curtains in his windows are disfiguring the entire apartment complex, it becomes clear that all his accumulated despair and resentment will one day lead to something terrible. Janne Virtanen is brilliant in the role of Veli-Matti and knows how to make him a warm and likeable human being even when the world around him crumbles and freezes. Director Aku Louhimies resists any gratuitous sentimentality, keeping his focus squarely on his main characters and it is this deceptively simple quality that elevates Frozen City from a simple, low-tech and small-cast drama to a compelling human tragedy of Dostoyevskian proportions.