The Snow Walker (2003)

THE SNOW WALKER  (2003)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Charles Martin Smith
    Barry Pepper, Annabella Piugattuk, James Cromwell, 
    Kiersten Warren, Jon Gries, Robin Dunne
An under-the-radar survival adventure about a bush pilot and an Inuit woman who come to rely on each other in ways they could not have expected when their plane goes down somewhere in Canada's vast Northwest Territories. At first, their key to life or death appears to be with the pilot. He has a rifle, after all. But it's the woman who  understands the environment they're in, who can catch a fish, snare a groundhog, start a fire without matches and skin a caribou. Handy things to know when you're lost and off-course with limited supplies and no working radio, hundreds of miles from nowhere and winter's closing in. What distinguishes this are the performances of Barry Pepper and Annabella Puigattuk as two characters who appear to have nothing in common, including a language, and find a way to transcend that, through necessity and a sense of shared humanity. They're not a couple in any romantic sense - to its credit, the movie doesn't go there - but they're an effective odd-couple team, the chemistry between them both grudgingly earned and discreetly expressed.