SUNDANCE ’20 REVIEW

SUNDANCE 2020: Amusing ‘DOWNHILL’ Remake Assumes American Stance, Lets Comic Giants Ride

Name: Downhill review
Item: Downhill
Rating: 3.7
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · January 28, 2020

SUNDANCE 2020: Amusing ‘DOWNHILL’ Remake Assumes American Stance, Lets Comic Giants Ride

Where to watch: Streaming free on Pluto TV, or rent or buy on digital (updated October 2026)Watch on Pluto TV · Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

A remake of the critically-acclaimed Swedish drama Force Majeure, Downhill is kind of exactly like most American remakes of critically-acclaimed foreign dramas: amusing but unnecessary. A blue-square redo of a double-black-diamond story. With the hard-packed dual casting of Will Ferrell (who’s better here than he’s been in years) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who also produced), the dramedy from The Way Way Back co-writers and directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash borrows the premise and some of the critical breaking points from Ruben Östlund’s film but also finds room for new traumas and dark comedic moments to unfold.

For those unfamiliar with Force Majeure, the film follows a family on vacation in the Alps who are forced to reevaluate their relationships after a close-call with an avalanche. When a potentially-deadly wall of snow accelerates towards Pete’s (Ferrell) family, the husband and father makes a mad dash, leaving wife Billie (Louis-Dreyfus) and their two children to fend for themselves. While the avalanche fails to inflict any real physical damage, the crisis is not averted. Confronting Pete’s cowardice in the face of death evokes psychological torment for the family, a zap of PTSD that leaves more questions than answers. The family’s faith in their patriarch shook – potentially irrevocably – the family is forced to take a long hard look in the mirror to reassess what (and who) matters most.

Downhill maintains the same base lodge formula, reusing the brilliant conceit to propel a mogul field of marital bumps. Allowing the tone to take on a more darkly humorous side, Downhill has pleasures outside of its proximity to Force Majeure and it’s here that the movie finds its own pace. With Downhill, Ferrell has finally snapped out of a long-ass spell of poor career choices. You’d have to go back more than a decade to find his last starring role of any value (I will stan Stepbrothers until the day I die, however) but under Faxon and Nash’s direction, he’s able to turn down the slapstick, goofball act and dial up the inner conflict to white-out effect: he’s able to be both funny and human here, a necessary pivot for a comic giant stuck in a rut.

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Following her eight year tenure on Veep, it’s a goddamn pleasure to see Julia Louis-Dreyfus back on the big screen (the first time since 2013’s sweet romance Enough Said alongside James Gandolfini) proving that any world without a surplus of JLD is a world I don’t want to live in. She balances the pathos and dark wit of Billie with ease, fencing her ongoing stake in her relationship as she comes to grips with the fact that her life partner abandoned her and her children in the heat of the moment.

Downhill pings the two comic giants off each other expertly, they duck and weave towards a sordid conclusion; Pete battling his own deflated ego and sense of self-worth; Billie questioning her commitment and life decisions. The humor is wry and icy, undercut with a good kicker of pathos and genuinely slushy reflection, the explosive fallout of “the incident” resulting in awkward tête-à-têtes that sometimes involve bystanders like work friends Zach (Zach Woods) and girlfriend Rosie (Zoe Chao) or the intrusive concierge Charlotte (Miranda Otto), all of whom are very funny here.

Any purist would direct audiences towards a Force Majeure rental in lieu of a Downhill lift ticket and they wouldn’t be wrong. The former is without doubt a better movie and, to quote Bong Joon-Ho, as long as you can “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” pretty much anyone will discover many riches inside Östlund’s creation. But even despite this fact, Faxon and Rash’s version gets just off-piste Force Majeure enough without ever truly going into the woods, offering plenty reason to still exist and remain on its feet; mainly in the fact that theirs is a funnier version of events, if without the same level of truly scathing freestyle soul-searching and moral ambiguity. And though Downhill doesn’t blast out the same emotional depths as the Swedish original, getting to see Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus snowplow and bounce off each other for 87-minutes is all the sweet cinematic pow pow that Downhill needs.

CONCLUSION: As far as Americanized remakes go, ‘Downhill’ has plenty to offer, mainly in the ping-pong interplay between stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash doing enough to justify their new version without threatening ever really to dethrone the original as the superior feature.