Film

The Ice Storm

Name: The Ice Storm
Genre: Drama
Released: 1997
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Jamey Sheridan, Christina Ricci

Ang Lee's precise, chilly dissection of two Connecticut families sleepwalking through the twilight of the sexual revolution, one numb Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. Key parties, teenage experimentation, and marriages running on fumes, all filmed with the hush of held breath. It's for people who like their family drama literary, unshowy, and devastating in retrospect rather than in the moment.

TMDb rating

6.9

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American Beauty1999

The other great American suburban-rot movie, just a quarter-century later and louder about it. Same rotten domestic core, same sense of adults behaving like teenagers while their kids watch, appalled.

But Its satire is broader and its style showier than The Ice Storm's restraint; it wants you to notice its cleverness.

Ordinary People1980

An affluent family freezing over from grief instead of infidelity, but the same icy WASP repression, the same sense that nobody in the house can say the true thing out loud.

But Slower and more theatrical, with none of Lee's period texture or ensemble sprawl — this is a tight three-hander.

The Virgin Suicides2000

Suburban teenagers again, this time girls, again suffocating under parents who mistake control for love. Sofia Coppola gives it a dreamier, more elegiac haze than Lee's clear-eyed cold.

But More impressionistic and less plotted; if you wanted The Ice Storm's social precision, this trades it for mood.

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Scenes from a Marriage2021

Same year, same subject — a marriage curdling under the era's promises of liberation — but told with total formal austerity instead of Lee's crowded ensemble canvas.

Bergman's Swedish television miniseries, made the same year The Ice Storm is set, strips a marriage down to two people talking in rooms until the talking becomes unbearable.

But No ensemble, no period texture, no plot momentum — just two actors and Bergman's merciless close-ups for hours.

The Squid and the Whale2005

Divorce filtered through kids too smart and too hurt to process it properly, with the same excruciating comedy of adults being terrible at adulthood in front of their children.

But Shorter, scrappier, funnier and meaner — Baumbach's register is sharper elbows rather than Lee's melancholy.

Little Children2006

Suburban adultery again, with the same sense of well-off people mistaking boredom for tragedy, until an actual tragedy arrives and reframes everything they were doing.

But A subplot involving a sex offender pushes it into darker, pulpier territory than Ice Storm ever goes.

Revolutionary Road2008

An earlier decade's version of the same marriage — ambition curdling into contempt inside a beautiful house nobody can actually live in happily.

But More operatic and shouty where The Ice Storm whispers; the fights here are the point, not the silences.

In the Bedroom2001

Another New England family coming apart under a still, watchful camera, with grief working the same slow damage that repression does in The Ice Storm.

But Turns into something closer to a moral thriller in its back half, which changes the temperature considerably.

The Door in the Floor2004no page yet

A marriage disintegrating in a beautiful summer house, adapted from John Irving with the same interest in how grief and desire get tangled up together in adults who should know better.

But Jeff Bridges' character is a much larger, stranger presence than anyone in Lee's more ensemble-balanced film.

Terms of Endearment1983

A gear change of pace — warmer, funnier, more openly emotional — but still about a family whose politeness is covering for things nobody wants to say plainly.

But It earns its tears through melodrama rather than dread; expect sentiment where Ice Storm gave you silence.

Poltergeist1982

Both are about affluent American families built on denial, where the thing that finally breaks the surface was always underneath — Lee just doesn't need ghosts to make the point.

The suburban dread of The Ice Storm turned up to a scream: a nice family in a nice new development discovers the ground beneath their comfort is not what they were told.

But It's a full-blooded horror movie with special effects and jump scares, a long way from Lee's hushed naturalism.

BoJack Horseman2014

Both ask what happens when charming, self-deceiving adults keep choosing comfort over honesty until the people around them pay the bill — one does it in ice, the other in absurdist color.

An animated Netflix comedy that turns out to be one of the most serious studies of denial, self-sabotage, and generational damage on television, delivered through cartoon horses.

But The format is a genuine barrier for some — talking animals and gags sit oddly next to material this bleak, even once you're used to it.