Both in visual style and locale, Thin Ice sets itself somewhere in between the worlds of Fargo (1996) and Cedar Rapids (2011), a snowed-over Midwestern America that is populated by corny white men, at home in the banal, post-auto landscape. They walk in brown leather shoes across frozen parking lots outside of chain hotels, drop twenty dollar bills on worn out berber carpet, and shuffle papers in and out briefcases to make a living. There was a time when the puny men of the insurance industry – like their financial counterparts, the bankers – crept around grand, rock-faced buildings, like the deco fortress of Double Indemnity, which conveyed a formidable financial fortitude as lock-safe as Alcatraz. No wonder in this world of drab offices with thin doors, paper walls, and plastic indoor plants, you can “trust nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see,” as Greg Kinnear’s insurance salesman Mickey says in the opening voice over to Thin Ice. Through the lens of Thin Ice, white-draped Wisconsin is a world where half of what you see is so flimsy and cheap, you’re not even sure if it actually exists.

It is not long into writer/director Jill Sprecher’s film that we realize Kinnear’s skepticism is rooted in his own duplicitous ways. We meet him at an insurance salesman convention, where he lectures about his slick, hard-sale style, leveraging fear and aggression to under serve and over charge clients (“There’s no such thing as being over insured.”) But Mickey is also something of a sucker himself. Before he can check out of his hotel, he is seduced and robbed by a drunken woman, and he then hires the congenial Bob (David Harbour) merely to take a competitive jab at a rival broker. His problems follow him home, where his brokerage turns out to be nearly bankrupt and his marriage is falling apart.

Mickey is desperate and pitiful, and rather than just wearing out some shoe leather to right his fortunes, he looks for an easy way out. That opportunity is offered via an old man, who lives alone in a remote farmhouse and, unknowingly, possesses a valuable antique violin. When a violin dealer interested in the piece mistakes Mickey for the old man’s caretaker, Mickey plays along. It looks like easy theft, but a sudden – and jarring – turn of events lands Mickey is deep in it and forced into an unlikely partnership with a manic locksmith. Blackmailed and cornered like a stray dog, he is fighting for his life, much like William H Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, for a way out of his self-inflicted mess.

Given the many similarities in setting, character, and situation between Thin Ice and Fargo, it is actually more interesting to note where the films diverge. Jill Sprecher is less emphatic about her wintery, Midwestern landscape, playing more off the starkly generic (ala Alexander Payne), rather then wielding it as a weighty metaphor. The snow and ice offer practical opportunities, but Sprecher’s movie isn’t grandly textured, offering something like noir-light. Thin Ice is more closely concerned with suckers, and how everyone dupes and plays the boob. It’s both engrossing and thin, a cautionary moral thriller that never cracks.