The first trailer for A Long Winter is out, and Heartstopper fans will spot Kit Connor at the family dinner table. He plays Tommy, a farm boy in 1951 Colorado who can’t wait to ship out to the Korean War and leave the mountains behind.
The love story belongs to the brother he leaves behind. Mike, played by The White Lotus star Fred Hechinger, stays on the farm, watches his mother vanish into a blizzard and starts falling for the quiet young man who ends up sleeping in Tommy’s bed. That man is played by Reservation Dogs star D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Kit’s co-star from Warfare.
Andrew Haigh is the gay filmmaker behind All of Us Strangers, Weekend and HBO’s Looking. When Kit joined the cast last year, Queerty was already daydreaming about Kit and D’Pharaoh as an on-screen couple. The trailer shows they got the casting half right.
Kit Connor’s Tommy Can’t Wait To Get Out
Tommy is the younger of two sons raised on a remote mountain farm by Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, The Bear) and Louise (Caitríona Balfe, Outlander). He’s the restless one. According to The Wrap’s review, he says he doesn’t want to spend his life “in this dump.”
Mike is the opposite. He’s just back from a year working on a farm in Iowa, and he’s happy to stay put. He says it himself in the trailer: “Some people want change. But I like things the way they are.”
A warning for Nick Nelson devotees: Kit isn’t on screen for long. Critics who caught the film on the festival circuit say Tommy gets only a few scenes before he leaves for Korea, and we never hear from him again. His exit is the first crack in the family, and far from the last.
A Mother Walks Into The Snow
With Tommy gone, the house goes quiet and the tension between his parents gets louder. Louise feels trapped in a much smaller life than she wanted. She drinks, keeps issues of Cosmopolitan hidden from her husband, and daydreams about the modern appliances in their pages.
Then the season’s first blizzard rolls in. Louise takes the dog out for a walk and doesn’t come back.
Mike and his father go looking for her, and the search stretches across the whole winter, with friends and townspeople pitching in. Louise’s brother Frank, played by Martin Freeman, tells Mike things about his mother that apparently everyone in town knew except him.
The Trailer Hides The Romance In Plain Sight
MUBI’s trailer is mostly snow, candlelight and long silences. Look closer, though, and the film’s secret is right there: a hand lingering on a magazine photo of a shirtless swimwear model, and later, two young men leaning in until their foreheads touch.
It also flashes some of its reviews, including five stars from The Guardian, which called the film “mysterious and beautiful.”
Enter Jimmy
With Louise missing, Lester takes in Jimmy, a young man who moves into the house to cook, clean and handle what Screen Daily calls the “women’s work.” He takes over Tommy’s old bed.
Little White Lies describes Jimmy as a sullen, near-silent orphan, and says Mike is quietly enchanted with him anyway. Screen Daily points out that Mike’s furtive glances at a local cop were already a clue to his closeted sexuality. Jimmy’s arrival pushes it much further.
Don’t go in expecting Weekend, though. Haigh is known for frank, realistic love scenes, but he told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted this one to be different. For him, Mike’s sexuality is tied up with the way he sees the world, and queerness is about more than desire. “He needs someone to understand how he sees the world,” Haigh said.
A Story Haigh Waited 20 Years To Tell
The film is based on a short story by gay Irish author Colm Tóibín, originally set in Spain. Haigh read it around its 2006 publication, before he’d directed a single feature, and talked Tóibín into giving him the rights. For years, nobody wanted to make it. After All of Us Strangers became his biggest box office hit, he finally got his chance and moved the story to the Rockies.
The crew built the family’s house from scratch on a mountainside about an hour outside Calgary, in brutal wind and snow. It’s the same area where The Revenant was shot, which is why Haigh calls the film “my version of The Revenant,” only gentler.
Most critics think it was worth the wait. Screen Daily called it masterful, and The Wrap called it “quietly virtuosic.” The Playlist was the odd one out, calling it a middling drama.
What’s Next For Kit Connor
Even in a small part, A Long Winter keeps Kit’s grown-up film career moving. He said goodbye to Nick Nelson this summer with Heartstopper Forever, and his turn as a young Navy SEAL recruit in Warfare won him a British Independent Film Award.
He’s also been through more public scrutiny than most actors his age. In 2022, after people online accused him of queerbaiting, he came out as bisexual on Twitter at 18, and made it clear he felt forced to.
The projects ahead of him are much bigger than this one. He’s set to lead Alex Garland’s Elden Ring movie for A24, due in March 2028, and to voice Charlie in Netflix’s animated Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory. In August, Deadline reported that Marvel had picked him to play Cyclops in its new X-Men film.
When You Can See It
A Long Winter premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September and had its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 14. According to Queerty, MUBI will open it in New York on December 4, then release it in US theaters on January 22, 2027. UK cinemas get it on January 15.
Kit’s character gets out early. The movie is about everyone who doesn’t.