Jimmy Starks (Guy Pearce) is a salesman who can sell virtually anything to anyone. He’s a smooth-talking dynamo at the top of his game, and if he gets the right financial backing he’s got a sure-fire idea guaranteed to make both himself and whoever partners with him oodles of cash.

But even Jimmy can’t talk his way out of car repairs after the engine conks out in the middle of New Mexico nowhere. With nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs, and not very interested in spending more time than he has to in the local bar, he decides to pass an hour getting a reading from a roadside soothsayer (J.K. Simmons). But the session ends abruptly, the man startled by something he will not explain, Jimmy wandering off scratching his head as to what the heck just happened in comical disbelief.

Disbelief turns to wonder and wonder turns to worry after a few of the prophet’s more benign predictions start coming remarkably true. But if these visions are correct, what of the ones he wouldn’t disclose? Soon Jimmy is dealing with knowledge he’s not certain he really wanted to know. His behavior growing more erratic by the day, girlfriend Deirdre (Piper Perabo) and trusted coworker Ed (William Fichtner) fearful he’s falling apart, the salesman who can talk his way into and out of anything suddenly finds himself drifting down a snowy road of destiny he might not be able to turn off of.

For all the complexity hinted at in that synopsis in the end First Snow is a nothing more than an intimate character study of a man dealing with his own mortality masquerading as a thriller. Thankfully that illusion is a good one, and although I would have preferred a slightly quicker pace and bit tighter of a finale all-in-all director and co-writer Mark Fergus has managed to craft an atmospherically moody success.

Much of the reason for this can be traced directly to the performance of enigmatic star Pearce. While not quite up to the exemplary standards he set for himself in films as diverse as The Proposition, L.A. Confidential and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he’s still quite remarkable here. Inevitable comparisons to his classic Memento turn aside, this is a dynamite and absolutely fearless portrait of a man nearing the end of his rope, the tighter Pearce held on the more satisfying it became for me to watch his sanity slowly implode.

The rest of the high-powered character actors in the cast do what the, but in the end Fergus keeps the focus on Jimmy (which is probably as it should be), the sweeping vistas of his facial expressions as nuanced and as ever-changing as sand patterns whipping across a desert highway. But in the process of all this the director shortchanges the rest of the cast, and while I’d be remiss for not pointing out the gentle wondrous weary of Simmons understated work I’d be just as wrong for not remarking how one-dimensional the rest of the people in this movie really are.

While I can wash over that one a little bit, pacing is an issue I can’t dismiss no matter how much I try. Even at 100-minutes I still looked at my watch a time or two, the middle portion disjointed and muddled to the point I found my fondness for the picture starting to ebb. It doesn’t help that the climax doesn’t have the power or the impact it needs to score a direct hit, Fergus and Hawk Ostby’s script only skimming the surface of the emotional layers discussed electrically throughout much of the rest of the piece.

Yet, on the whole the picture still managed to muster up an hypnotic allure I just couldn’t shake. Eric Edwards (The Break Up) shoots things in magnificent dream-like detail while Cliff Martinez’s (Traffic) signature score adds an ethereal mystery only helping the filmmakers heighten the tension assaulting Jimmy. In fact, thanks in large part to Pearce I found myself still pondering ghostly layers of this long after I left the theater, and like a Winter refusing to break for Spring First Snow is an emotional thriller difficult to shake.