Director Jeremy Saulnier is not known for subtlety. His films are true-blue genre outings that are all about tension and bloody pay-offs. Saulnier’s last two features, Blue Ruin and Green Room, are instant classics. His latest, Hold the Dark, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and released exclusively on Netflix, may not immediately rise up to those high standards. It is, however, a fascinating exercise in atmosphere and subverting expectation.
There’s a lot off about the characters and setting in Hold the Dark, even if it immediately doesn’t seem so. Riley Keough plays Medora, a disturbed mother in the village of Keelut, Alaska whose son appears to have been taken by wolves. She summons naturalist Russel Core (Jeffrey Wright) to either find her son or the wolf, so she has something to show her husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), who is away fighting the war in Iraq.
There is something rotten in the heart of Keelut, a place where things have not so much gone wrong but stagnated to the point of macabre. It is a carcass of human society taken over by nature; it’s brutal, inexplicable but also transfixing.
Medora’s strange behaviour and motivations are the least of it. Keelut’s the kind of town where the inhabitants make “city folk” jokes about the rest of Alaska.
Jeffrey Wright, character actor extraordinaire, plays Russell as unlikely protagonist, someone who is unable to affect the course of events but only witness them. “You’re old” is how he is first greeted by Medora. He is a timid man who has let life pass him by in pursuit of something he doesn’t even remember.
Russell accepts a mission to hunt down wolves as an excuse to see his estranged daughter, in one of the stranger attempts to combine a professional trip with the personal.
Saulnier’s film has a lot on its mind. Take for instance Vernon’s introduction in Iraq. We see him gun down enemies with precision and kill one of his own to save an innocent woman. He is a good soldier and a good man. His behaviour in the rest of the film is in line with this capsule, but in the civilised world his brutal hunt for the killer of his child isn’t acceptable. Would it be fair to say that war attracts the deranged? Or is it hypocritical of us to expect any pursuit of justice to be bloodless?
Russell attempts to explain the murderous behaviour of the humans around him by transposing his knowledge of wolves. But he has also been shown mercy by the wolves, which feels even more incomprehensible from the humans.
Saulnier is working with a bigger budget than before, and he makes sure it shows. The snowy abyss has rarely looked as inviting. It’s fitting that Danish cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck is behind the camera here. The film uses real wolves and in one memorable shot a bison which dwarves a passing SUV.
It is remarkable then that Saulnier zigs when expected to zag. Hold the Dark is not the mystery thriller you wanted or expected. A more accurate description would be a ‘‘southern gothic set in Alaska”, as critic Vince Mancini puts it. The director has been talking up how the Hold the Dark has his highest “body count” till date, a boast that is made more hilarious by actually watching the film.
The majority of that body count is built up in a shoot-out midway through, a tense and tragic sequence that shows off Saulnier’s terrific skills. Where the movie goes from there, particularly at the end, will prove divisive. It’s a beautifully novelistic culmination (Hold the Dark is based on the William Giraldi book of the same name) to a moody film, where the viewer won’t walk away with answers, but with a strange tale to tell.
Hold the Dark is now streaming on Netflix.
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