When you first experience ski-town culture, it’s hard to imagine spending your life in any other place. The people you meet are active, all seem to have cool-sounding jobs, and are generally pretty nice. After spending a few years growing your social connections and figuring out how to get as many turns as possible on a pow day, you might even consider yourself a local. You start to meet other locals who’ve made the life choice to move here, graduating from your test phase of “working a season, maybe two” to actually putting down some roots. This is like the honeymoon period of ski-town life. You’ve been accepted by the community and you feel like you’ve always belonged here.
At some point in the next few years, you start to notice some quirks about your chosen ski town. Egos take up an obstinate amount of space, talking your ear off at après about how much radder their day was than yours. Relationships seem to start, finish, circulate, and start again. You start to notice how people you admired when you first moved here haven’t done much else with their lives since, except complain about how good it used to be. Then there’s the people who try a little too hard while seeking recognition (or sometimes validation) for how amazing their mountain-centric lives are. (On a personal note, it’s only in hindsight I realize how caught up I was in it all during my earlier Whistler years.)
Before long, it all feels like it would make the perfect setting for a comedy/drama, one that makes fun of all the ski-town tropes and people who take themselves way too seriously. Enter Katie Burrell and her first feature-length film, Weak Layers.
You’ve probably seen Burrell’s work before. The Revelstoke-based filmmaker and self-proclaimed “leisure athlete” has mastered the ski-town mockumentary style, giving voice to the rank-and-file ski-town inhabitants who don’t necessarily roll with the pros or who might struggle a bit to keep up on the skin track. In recent years, her hilarious, often self-deprecating videos have been featured in everything from destination tourism campaigns to Arcteryx-sponsored holiday short films. Her humorous approach to a pros-obsessed culture isn’t just a breath of fresh air, it holds up a mirror to ski-town elitism and pokes it right in the eye. Weak Layers is inspired by the classic mainstream ski films of yore like Aspen Extreme and Ski Patrol, but turns the archaic male bravado on its head with three women—including Burrell herself—in the leading roles.
“Weak Layers speaks to the concept of the nobodies,” said Burrell in an interview with CBC’s Gloria Macarenko. “We accept and embrace the community we have instead of this game of comparison where we’re constantly trying to be something we’re not, or look at someone and say, ‘that’s better than what I already have.’”
Burrell plays the character of Cleo Brown, a 30-something ski-town local and aspiring filmmaker who is somewhat lost in life. After an out-of-hand house party leaves her and her roommates broke, homeless and living in a van, they enter an illustrious mountain film competition in the hopes the prize money will sustain them for a few more months of skiing. The film does feature great action footage, of course, filmed by some of the best cinematographers in the ski industry. But it’s not that type of ski movie. Weak Layers reminds us life in a ski town isn’t about how many “cool” people you know at the action sport photo competition or cliquey film premier. It’s celebrating those nobodies, the everyday folks in the community who simply love the mountains and love to go skiing.
Burrell nailed it with her first feature film, both as a director and actor. The timing in her career was perfect to bring her “professional leisure athlete” voice to the big screen, and she put a production team together that kept her film looking and feeling authentic every step of the way. Of all the ski movies you watch in 2024, Weak Layers is one that will leave you feeling great about spending your life in a ski town.
Weak Layers is available now on Apple TV.
Vince Shuley gives Weak Layers two thumbs up. For questions, comments or suggestions for The Outsider, email [email protected] or Instagram @whis_vince.
