Hold the Dark

HOLD THE DARK – not to be tumbled with Julie Taymor’s musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark – is a made-for-Netflix movie from 2018. I guess time flies, considering I didn’t realize it had been that many years I’d been meaning to see it. It was on my list considering it’s the fourth mucosa 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 two-face (and directed the upcoming remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER).

The weightier 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 stratify 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 – theoretically not the first child to disappear virtually 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 skiver a wolf and wrote well-nigh it in a typesetting she read. She wants him to skiver this wolf surpassing her husband Vernon (The Northman himself, Alexander Skarsgard) gets when from the war.

Russell isn’t some manlike hunter, he’s a quiet, unassuming man who she knows from his writing will have sympathy for the wolf. He’s not from the zone and doesn’t plane have good boots – she loans him her husband’s. Surpassing he starts his hunt, a neighbor named Illanaq (Tantoo Cardinal, WIND RIVER, WENDELL & WILD) gives him one of those destined-to-be-ignored unclear warnings – she tells him he’s going the wrong way, and says Medora “knows evil”. Make of that what you will.

I unchangingly thought this was gonna be a quiet survival movie out in snowy nature, but it’s increasingly complicated than that. Some weird shit going on here. For example when he’s sleeping in the motel he hears Medora talking to herself in the suffuse 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 worthier surprise though is when the story suddenly jumps to her husband in gainsay in Iraq. It unprotected me off baby-sit partly considering the time period was unclear and I was thinking maybe he was in Vietnam. I like the jarring transpiration in climate and the unstudied 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 overdue 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 wideness a fellow American soldier in the middle of raping a local, so he stabs the guy a tuft of times, hands the underdone pocketknife 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 squatter to squatter with a pack of wolves chowing lanugo on some sufferer 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 drastic unbearable to eat their own. And he’s right well-nigh that. When he gets when to the motel he can’t find Medora, but he does find her son’s not-eaten-by-wolves soul in the basement, covered by a tarp.

He runs outside muttering “Help! The boy! The boy!” and I kinda thought everybody was gonna vituperation this strange outsider, but the neighbors seem to know what the deal is. He doesn’t have to explain himself. They icon that crazy white lady is possessed by a wolf demon.

When Vernon gets when in town he’s met at the airport by his friend Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope, PREY), who moreover lost a kid to wolves. At the morgue, police senior 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 soul and skiver 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 variegated from any others I can think of. And it has this prelude of deep unease and plane 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 squint suspicious. But they’re not there for that, they’re going next door to try to trespassing Cheeon. So they’re too rented to scarecrow asking what he’s doing there, and he unmistakably wants to tell them well-nigh the soul he just discovered, but he can’t icon out how to broach the subject right now.

And then there’s this unconfined scene of Marium going to the door and trying to talk Cheeon into turning himself in peacefully. He seems to know there’s no endangerment he’ll do it, but doesn’t want to requite up without making a genuine effort.

The shootout is flipside BLUE RUIN maneuver, this time rejecting the glamour of gun fights. It’s just one crazy guy with a machine gun pointed out an scalp 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 overly comes for you.

The officers have a pretty good idea when it’s well-nigh to happen, but they’re not at all ready for it. They shoot when but they don’t have a chance, it’s too lopsided. Sooner one officer gets in one of the cars and tries to when away, clips the unshut door on flipside car, spins out, gets nowhere, gets hit.

Our protagonist, Russell, spends scrutinizingly the unshortened thing cowering under a car (like a reasonable person), but sooner picks up a rifle from a sufferer officer, bravely walks toward the window firing confidently, and if you’ve overly seen a movie surpassing you think he’s gonna be the big hero, show up all the cops by taking Cheeon out easily. I’m wrung not. He fires several shots, I’m not sure if he plane hits him surpassing Cheeon runs out of trajectile and Marium sneaks into the room.

The total shit show quality of this scene feels very authentic, not considering cops are incompetent, but considering most never have to deal with this kind of stuff. When Russell asks Marium well-nigh it later he tells him the scariest thing he overly saw surpassing that was when he raided a meth lab, and a guy fired four times and missed every shot. “Purse gun. Sounded like rainbow wrap,” he says. Unconfined line – seems very novelistic, so I’m guessing it must come from the typesetting 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 worthier ambitions, but it feels less focused, less direct. It’s increasingly 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 weft 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 senior 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 squint forward to his next one, REBEL RIDGE, filmed last summer, with Dale in the tint again.