In Shattered Ice, a Hockey Player’s Suicide Stuns a Small Town

When Jake Miskin was a high school athlete, five fellow students died by suicide in his small Massachusetts town. He set out to tell the kind of story he wishes they would have seen, that could have given them hope. The result is the moving, insightful Shattered Ice, which made its world premiere Monday at the Sedona International Film Festival.

The film uses sports as a metaphor because, as Miskin explained at a post-film Q&A Monday, sports are how "a lot of lot of kids have their first heartbreak, their first friends, their first obstacles in life." Shattered Ice follows a high school hockey player named Will Mankus (breakout Charlie Gillespie, himself a longtime hockey player, leading an excellent cast) who spirals after the suicide of his best friend and teammate Danny (Sterling Beaumon).

Will goes quiet and takes up whiskey, blaming himself for not seeing the signs. So do many other people around the film's town of Nehoiden, a fictional stand-in for Miskin's real-life hometown of Needham, a Boston suburb that shares with Nehoiden both a quiet reserve and deep love of winter sports. Miskin hopes Shattered Ice can break the metaphorical ice around the still-taboo subjects of mental illness and suicide.

"It's inspired by my hometown, where we lost five students to suicide while we were in high school," he said in the Q&A with festival executive director Patrick Schweiss. "I always wanted to tell a story about the conversations my friends or our town were or weren't having, and showing how people grieve differently."

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The film doesn't focus so much on the reasons for a particular suicide as on the wreckage every suicide leaves behind. The town of Needham came through to help him tell the story: Miskin and fellow producer Benjamin Stephen raised money through grassroots community fundraising — including a raffle and reaching out to local charities and investors — and making use of local businesses after dark.

(Your Massachusetts-based correspondent first met Jake when I overheard him pitching Shattered Ice at local breakfast spot Bagel's Best — which turns up in a key scene in the film.)

Even as they raised money, Miskin and his collaborators plugged away to attract experienced, very assured director Alex Ranarivelo, whose past films include the sports dramas Born a Champion and The Ride, and actors including The Flash and Suits LA veteran Matt Letscher, as well as The Walking Dead actress Kyla Kenedy, How to Get Away With Murder actor Jack Falahee, and, crucially, producer and skating consultant Christopher V. Nelson, who worked on arguably the greatest hockey movie of all, 2004's Miracle. (He vetoed actors who couldn't skate.)

Ranarivelo said he was especially intrigued by the script because hockey is "so macho, and it's guys being tough — it kind of felt like the last place where you're going to open up and be vulnerable."

Falahee, who is deeply sympathetic in his role as a young coach with problems of his own, was drawn to the film because he, too, had lost a friend to suicide. He took up acting when a friend, who had been expected to perform in a school play, took his own life. Falahee decided that appearing in the play would be a way to mourn the loss.

Shattered Ice at the Sedona International Film Festival

Sedona was in many ways an ideal location for the film to premiere: It is a place devoted to therapy, rejuvenation and healing, especially in the solitude of the endless, sprawling trails that surround the town. Shattered Ice premiered at the Sedona Performing Arts Center, next door to Sedona Red Rock Junior Senior High School, where soccer practice was underway Monday at the time of the premiere, and where Shattered Ice will be shown this week to student athletes.

Miskin and his colleagues are working to get the film screened for high school athletes all over the country, and already have a plan to screen it for Massachusetts college hockey players, who are uniquely familiar with the culture of stress, bravado, and holding it all in that the film portrays so effectively. The film's partners include The Hidden Opponent, a non-profit that promotes mental health for student athletes.

Stephen went to school with Miskin and lost the same friends. He noted that they, like Danny in the film, didn't seem like people who needed help.

"The students that we lost, the friends that we lost, a lot of them were just like Danny — student athletes, really talented. Everything on the surface is perfect. People are jealous of them, and, you know, they had standing in the school, social standing in the town and community," he said.

"And I really think that it just goes to show — hopefully this came across in the message of the film — that you can never really know what someone's going through. And the only way to really bring that out is to start talking and having those conversations."

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Main image: Shattered Ice. Nehoiden Films.