HOLD THE DARK – not to be confused with Julie Taymor’s musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark – is a made-for-Netflix movie from 2018. I guess time flies, because I didn’t realize it had been that many years I’d been meaning to see it. It was on my list because it’s the fourth film from director Jeremy Saulnier (MURDER PARTY, BLUE RUIN, GREEN ROOM), and it’s written by Macon Blair, who appeared in all of those as an actor (and directed the upcoming remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER).
The best label I can come up with to describe this one is an Alaskan Gothic. It’s quiet and gloomy, with lots of snow, tiny fire-lit cabins, death and superstition. A movie that gives you the feeling of cold, wet socks inside your boots, and wearing a heavy winter coat indoors. It starts with a little boy playing outside in the small Alaskan village of Keelut, and a wolf approaches. And then the kid is gone – apparently not the first child to disappear around here. His mother Medora (Riley Keough, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) sends a letter to a wolf expert named Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright, SHAFT) who once had to kill a wolf and wrote about it in a book she read. She wants him to kill this wolf before her husband Vernon (The Northman himself, Alexander Skarsgard) gets back from the war.
Russell isn’t some macho hunter, he’s a quiet, unassuming man who she knows from his writing will have sympathy for the wolf. He’s not from the area and doesn’t even have good boots – she loans him her husband’s. Before he starts his hunt, a neighbor named Illanaq (Tantoo Cardinal, WIND RIVER, WENDELL & WILD) gives him one of those destined-to-be-ignored cryptic warnings – she tells him he’s going the wrong way, and says Medora “knows evil”. Make of that what you will.
I always thought this was gonna be a quiet survival movie out in snowy nature, but it’s more complicated than that. Some weird shit going on here. For example when he’s sleeping in the cabin he hears Medora talking to herself in the bath tub and then she comes in naked wearing a wolf mask and cuddles up to him. He can’t bring himself to ask her what the deal is with that.
A bigger surprise though is when the story suddenly jumps to her husband in combat in Iraq. It caught me off guard partly because the time period was unclear and I was thinking maybe he was in Vietnam. I like the jarring change in climate and the casual horror of what’s going on. You know how BLUE RUIN obliterates all the glamour of revenge? This does something like that for War On Terror heroism scenes. We see Vern (no relation) taking out an insurgent, and whether or not it’s justified, it just doesn’t seem fair. He’s behind a mounted machine gun with sunglasses on, looking bored, putting no effort in at all, but punching hundreds of giant holes through this truck, setting the guy on fire as he flees, setting the truck on fire. Doing his job.
Later he comes across a fellow American soldier in the middle of raping a local, so he stabs the guy a bunch of times, hands the bloody knife to the woman, and leaves. Did a big thing but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. As he’s leaving, shots ring out from somewhere, and he gets hit on the neck. He’s very lucky in the sense that it don’t go into or through him, it just knicked his skin, but it’s a nasty one, gushing all kinds of blood, and he gets sent home.
On his hunt, Russell comes face to face with a pack of wolves chowing down on some dead wolf cubs. He doesn’t shoot them. If I understand correctly, he figures they couldn’t have ate these kids or they wouldn’t be desperate enough to eat their own. And he’s right about that. When he gets back to the cabin he can’t find Medora, but he does find her son’s not-eaten-by-wolves body in the basement, covered by a tarp.
He runs outside muttering “Help! The boy! The boy!” and I kinda thought everybody was gonna blame this strange outsider, but the neighbors seem to know what the deal is. He doesn’t have to explain himself. They figure that crazy white lady is possessed by a wolf demon.
When Vernon gets back in town he’s met at the airport by his friend Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope, PREY), who also lost a kid to wolves. At the morgue, police chief Donald Marium (James Badge Dale, THE EMPTY MAN) introduces him to Russell – the guy who found his kid, the last person to see his wife, the guy wearing his boots. Awkward. Later, Vernon and Cheeon steal the body and kill the coroner and other cops who are there. Which is not what you’re supposed to do!
Yeah, there’s some kind of supernatural shit going on here, most of it not explained directly, some of it I’m not totally sure I followed, but obviously there are some possessed or cursed individuals, some rituals for disposing of bodies, and what not. And everybody’s trying to find Medora.
For me one of the highlights is in the middle when it explodes into a really top shelf shoot out – one that feels pretty different from any others I can think of. And it has this prelude of deep unease and even in my opinion some very dark, kinda queasy humor. Russell has gone to see Illanaq and found her murdered, and just as he’s leaving in terror the cops are all pulling up outside. Oh shit, now he’s really gonna look suspicious. But they’re not there for that, they’re going next door to try to arrest Cheeon. So they’re too busy to bother asking what he’s doing there, and he clearly wants to tell them about the body he just discovered, but he can’t figure out how to broach the subject right now.
And then there’s this great scene of Marium going to the door and trying to talk Cheeon into turning himself in peacefully. He seems to know there’s no chance he’ll do it, but doesn’t want to give up without making a genuine effort.
The shootout is another BLUE RUIN maneuver, this time rejecting the glamour of gun fights. It’s just one crazy guy with a machine gun pointed out an attic window, firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds into police and police cars just like Vernon when he massacred the shit out of that insurgent in a war zone. He has no pretense of getting away, he’s just exercising what the gun lobby has convinced a portion of our country is a right enshrined in the constitution – to take out as many pigs as possible if the government ever comes for you.
The officers have a pretty good idea when it’s about to happen, but they’re not at all ready for it. They shoot back but they don’t have a chance, it’s too lopsided. Eventually one officer gets in one of the cars and tries to back away, clips the open door on another car, spins out, gets nowhere, gets hit.
Our protagonist, Russell, spends almost the entire thing cowering under a car (like a reasonable person), but eventually picks up a rifle from a dead officer, bravely walks toward the window firing confidently, and if you’ve ever seen a movie before you think he’s gonna be the big hero, show up all the cops by taking Cheeon out easily. I’m afraid not. He fires several shots, I’m not sure if he even hits him before Cheeon runs out of ammo and Marium sneaks into the room.
The total shit show quality of this scene feels very authentic, not because cops are incompetent, but because most never have to deal with this kind of stuff. When Russell asks Marium about it later he tells him the scariest thing he ever saw before that was when he raided a meth lab, and a guy fired four times and missed every shot. “Purse gun. Sounded like bubble wrap,” he says. Great line – seems very novelistic, so I’m guessing it must come from the book by William Giraldi.
I understand why HOLD THE DARK didn’t seem to go over as well as BLUE RUIN or GREEN ROOM. It has similar strengths, and maybe bigger ambitions, but it feels less focused, less direct. It’s more complicated narratively and thematically without coming together in a way that feels very coherent to me. And yet I think it’s pretty good. When it’s a buddy movie with two top shelf character actors furling their brows and matter-of-factly strolling together into snowy hell, that’s something to savor. (I like when Russell just has to trust the chief that he knows how to fly a small plane and land it on a frozen lake. Gulp.) And it has that no-one-is-safe brutality of the previous Saulnier movies. If this is him on a bad day, that’s a strong director. I look forward to his next one, REBEL RIDGE, filmed last summer, with Dale in the cast again.
May 22nd, 2023 at 7:46 am
I’ve been a Saulnier fan since MURDER PARTY (Proof:
Murder Party
Murder Party is the product of some kind of bizarre new offshoot of the straight-to-video indie scene that the internet tastemakers are cal...
) but I never got around to this one, mostly because Dan Prestwich said it was too boring for him, and if a movie’s too boring for Dan Prestwich, a man who has sat through and enjoyed movies that would put me in a coma, I figured I should stay far away for the sake of my sanity. Honestly, I thought it was a western, just Jeffrey Wright wandering around the woods by himself looking for a metaphorical wolf, maybe having flashbacks to a dead wife or something. But this sounds more interesting than what I was picturing. I might have to pull the trigger before it gets Zaslaved.