[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
The Netflix original feature HOLD THE DARK has a lot going for it. It creates a great sense of
place with its rural Alaska setting. That in turn contributes to a tone of
cold, quiet desolation. The WICKER MAN-esque
trappings of strange pagan wolf-based beliefs are suitably unnerving. Jeremy
Saulnier’s grindhouse meets arthouse style is just as potent as it was in BLUE RUIN and GREEN ROOM. And the cast boasts such reliable solid players as
Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, and Riley Keough. Unfortunately there are
issues either inherent in the source novel by William Giraldi or in its
adaptation for the screen by Macon Blair that make HOLD THE DARK a frustrating experience.
Wright plays wolf expert Russell Core. He’s been called in
to kill a pack of wolves responsible for the deaths of 3 children by Medora
(Keough), the mother of the most recent victim. As it turns out things aren’t
entirely as they seem, though. Medora likes walking around wearing nothing but
a wooden wolf mask and trying to get strange wolf experts to strangle her. It
also turns out that she’s the one responsible for the death of her son, which
Core discovers after she has gone on the lam.
The boy’s father Vernon (Skarsgård) is a soldier stationed
in Iraq. He seems to have a personal code that supersedes his loyalty to
country, as we witness him killing a fellow soldier for raping an Iraqi woman.
Shortly after that, he is wounded as sent home to learn of his son’s death.
Vernon’s response to this news is to kill the messengers.
Then, with the help of another villager who lost his child, Cheeon (Julian Black),
Vernon steals his son’s body and buries it after first performing some kind of
blood ritual. Vernon sets off in search of Medora, while Cheeon stays behind to
keep anyone from following Vernon. He does a pretty good job of it, too, taking
out a good number of cops before Core and Police Chief Donald Marium (James Badge Dale) are able
to stop him.
Now, at this point, I have questions. If Vernon wanted to track
down his wife without anyone following him, wouldn’t it have made more sense not to kill all these innocent people? Doesn’t that just insure a larger, more
aggressive pursuit? And given that the film makes a point of showing Vernon’s
moral code in Iraq, how does killing all these people who had nothing to do
with his son’s death jibe with that?
The movie kind of lost me here, at what would be about the
halfway mark. And while I stuck with it because of the quality of acting and
direction, hoping for some sort of satisfactory explanation, I never got one.
I’m less concerned with the lingering questions about the
whole wolf mask thing, and what exactly Vernon and Medora are (Werewolves? Members
of some kind of weird religious cult? Just plain crazy?), but a little clarification
on that front might have been nice, too. Ambiguity is fine, and I often prefer
it. In this case, however, the audience needed more information to understand
why the characters did what they did.
It’s also hard to know how to feel about the film’s themes,
which are murky as well. Obviously there’s something here about revenge and
family, but unlike in Saulnier’s BLUE
RUIN, it’s unclear what this film is trying to say about those subjects. I
can only wonder if perhaps the book this is based on featured more internal monologues
by the characters that helped explain things. Like I said in the
beginning, it’s a frustrating experience. I still think Saulnier is one of the
best new American directors, but I’m hoping next time around he goes back to
writing his own material.
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