Antarctica's First Homicide Heats Up Whiteout

CEBU, Philippines - Nature never intended you to survive in Antarctica. For U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), things are about to get even more dangerous, in Warner Bros.’ new suspense-thriller “Whiteout.” The only law enforcement in this unforgiving territory, she has just been sent to investigate a body on the ice. 

Antarctica’s first homicide. A shocking discovery in itself, it will plunge her into an even more bizarre mystery and the revelation of secrets long-buried under the endless ice…secrets that someone believes are still worth killing for.

As Stetko races to find the killer before he finds her, winter is already closing in. In the deadly Antarctic whiteout, she won’t see him till he’s a breath away.

“Audiences won’t immediately know what circumstances brought U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko to seek a post in Antarctica, or what she hoped to find there, but they will feel from the film’s opening beats that she is anxious to get out,” says Joel Silver, who produced “Whiteout” under the banner of his Dark Castle Entertainment, and calls it “the coldest thriller ever made.”

Director Dominic Sena, marking his second collaboration with Silver following their 2001 action thriller “Swordfish,” concurs. “Whatever she came looking for at the bottom of the world, she didn’t find it. Meanwhile, the place has gotten to her—the cold, the claustrophobia, the isolation. She’s at the breaking point and counting down to that last flight out before winter closes in with its six months of darkness.”

Stetko’s departure plans are put on hold when a body turns up in the ice field. Frozen to the ground by blood and ice, his arms and legs strangely contorted, the body is that of an American geologist named Weiss, a member of a small research team studying meteorite fragments. Closer examination reveals numerous broken bones and a fresh gash in his leg that has been crudely stitched up, but the cause of death is a deep chest wound delivered by an instrument very common to this rough terrain: an ice ax.

As much as Weiss’s death is a mystery, its location is even more baffling. Miles from nowhere. No tracks, no maps, no gear. What was he doing way out here? A murder victim is the last thing Stetko expected to find after two years of arduous but uneventful duty, and certainly the last thing she wants to deal with now. Nevertheless, passing him off to the nearest U.S. authorities at McMurdo Station 900 miles away is not an option. 

Unfortunately for Stetko whose bags are already packed, this doesn’t look like the kind of case that can be wrapped up easily. Instead, it becomes immediately more complex as Stetko turns her attention to the two remaining members of Weiss’s team, men who could be either prime suspects or the next victims of a killer whose motivation she has yet to discover. Opening soon across the Philippines, “Whiteout” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.