The name Tomas Alfredson may not sound too familiar to you, but he was the one who directed one of the best vampire movies of all time. From that project, his future was promising. And a lot. But overnight, a thriller with Michael Fassbender destroyed his career.
Alfredson was born in Sweden in 1965, and in 1988 he debuted behind the cameras, but it was in 2009 that he brought to the big screen the film that would make him gain a lot of popularity: Let Me In. The adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel earned rave reviews and has a perfect score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film had quite an international impact, and in 2010, Matt Reeves directed the American remake. In 2022, a series starring Demian Bichir was released.
The success of Let Me In led him to direct Gary Oldman in his next feature film. The Mole, released in 2011, is the adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy novel about the Kim Philby scandal in the 1970s. The story follows George Smiley, a British spy on a mission to find the mole who infiltrated the upper echelons of the secret service.
The Mole also received good reviews, so Alfredson’s international career was already assured. His next project, however, changed the course of everything.
A Timeless Shooting
Alfredson directed the adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s novel The Snowma. Fassbender was the protagonist of this ‘thriller’ in which he plays detective Harry Hol , in charge of investigating the disappearance of a woman. Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsburg, Val Kilmer, and JK Simmons rounded out the main cast.
Unlike the rest of the films, The Snowman had very bad reviews; its score on Rotten Tomatoes is 7%. It didn’t do too well at the box office either, as it only made more than $43 million worldwide. It was striking that a film that adapted a book from the detective saga by Nesbø, one of the greatest crime novel authors in Norway, failed in such a way.
Alfredson, for his part, blamed the shooting schedule and lack of time in pre-production. He also indicated that 10–15% of the script was left unshot. “Our shooting time in Norway was too short. We didn’t have the complete story with us, and when we started editing, we discovered that a lot was missing. It’s like when you’re doing a big puzzle and some pieces are missing, so you don’t see the picture. complete,” he indicated in The Independent in 2017.
Since The Snowman, Alfredson has continued working as a director, but on more unknown projects and without internationally famous actors and actresses.
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