Starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne and Richard Harris Directed by Bille August Rated R, with profanity and graphic violence Running time 120 minutes We give this film a rating of 4 out of 10

(March 21, 1997) -- Smilla's Sense of Snow is the slowest-moving thriller in recent memory -- which should come as no surprise, considering that it is based on a particularly slow-moving book. The novel, by Peter Hoeg, gained a certain cachet among critics, who excused its Valium pacing by acclaiming its literary pretensions.

The same cannot be said for the movie. This Smilla may be the most depressed film by a Swedish director since Ingmar Bergman was in his heyday. Pass the Prozac.

The problem is that director Bille August, a Bergman protege, treats this material as if the audience is already on the edge of its collective seat, when the opposite is true. There isn't a single moment of tension in the whole icy affair.

Julia Ormond plays Smilla Jespersen, the daughter of an Inuit woman from Greenland and an American doctor. She now lives in Copenhagen, where she is an expert in snow and ice (nice work if you can get it).

Her world is disrupted by the death of a little boy who lives in her apartment building, whom she had befriended. He apparently fell to his death while playing on the roof; Smilla, however, is convinced that he was murdered, that he fell while fleeing an assailant.

Her proof? A quick impression of the boy's footprints in the snow on the roof. Just from a glance, she can tell that the boy was running away from something. Call it Inuit intuition, the so-called sense of snow from the title.

But the more she looks into the death, the more resistance she encounters -- from the coroner, from the police and, eventually, from a corporate giant called Greenland Mining. The latter is run by a mysterious figure called Tork (Richard Harris, who gives a wordless performance until the film's final 10 minutes).

The conspiracy she uncovers -- the cover-up of deaths related to the discovery of a secret new energy source -- might be seen as a metaphor for the deadly possibilities of nuclear power. It might -- if the film actually made you want to think about things that deeply, instead of giving you the itch to run screaming from the theater an hour into the film.

The dialogue by writer Ann Biderman takes the pretentious, attentuated conversations of the novel and actually has people try to speak them out loud. "When I was little, I knew where I was going," Smilla observes. "I'm very lost now."

So is this movie, which drags its weak plot around like a broken tail. Its thriller elements seem mechanical and uninspired. The mystery aspects are as unsatisfying as everything else.

Ormond certainly has the brooding quality this heroine requires but, by the second hour, you're ready to yell, "Get some therapy!" Gabriel Byrne has a reticent confidence as the neighbor who becomes her lover (and who is more deeply involved in the case than Smilla can imagine). Robert Loggia has the thankless role of Smilla's father, an American doctor whose life in Copenhagen (or Greenland, for that matter) is never explained.

Smilla's Sense of Snow is more like a snow job, one designed to cash in on the novel's prestige. But the book was a bore -- and so is this cinematic adaptation.