The chill of the setting mirrors the icy relationship of a mother and her son as their pattern of withholding communication transforms an event as his school into a crisis in their bond.
The early part of the film biased this viewer with a sense of what may have actually happened, whereas by the end of the film, I called that initial perception into question. The filmmaker was perhaps giving the viewer the perspective of the protagonist struggling to understand what her son was going through, while not doing the work of connecting with him to really hear it.
An interesting idea to have the narrative's dramatic mood follow the Mahler Symphony's musical arc.
