HOLD THE DARK – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Behind every bloodsoaked frame of the four features of Jeremy Saulnier there’s something deeper, darker to be explored. Saulnier, the man behind Murder Party (2007), Blue Ruin (2013), and Green Room (2015), has become an extremely reliable and continually interesting source for genre entertainment. He makes gore films that analyze the trappings of gore films, how the power fantasies of our innate desire for bloodshed can be contrasted with the cultural myths that we somehow believe. His first feature Murder Party explored the way that cultural elitism in itself is a type of violence towards people, Blue Ruin explored the way that cycles of violence prompted by murder and revenge can only lead to darker more desolate outcomes, and Green Room explored the purity of the artistic endeavour contrasted with the violent, hypocritical, masochistic ideology of Neo-Nazism. Now, Hold the Dark has appeared on Netflix to provide a next chapter in this blood-soaked exploration of our beliefs, presenting the hypothesis that the myth of familial kindness, the myth of the frontiersman or imperialist passing on anything but psychopathy to their children is false.

Hold the Dark comes to us courtesy of Saulnier and his good friend/writing partner Macon Blair (who released the excellent I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore last year), and Hold the Dark is their darkest exploration to date. Russell Core (played by an always sublime Jeffrey Wright) is called out to the remote town Keelut in Alaska by a grieving mother (Riley Keough). She’s sure that the wolves of the area have taken her son, sure that he’s been eaten. Core soon realizes that there’s something deeper going on, something more sinister and as the mystery unravels we are subjected to the moral question of whether or not a righteous kill can ever be that.

The strength of Hold the Dark comes in its length. It is a languid experience, dragging you into the cold and leaving you there, but only in the best way possible. The longer that Saulnier and Blair let you sit in the horror of it all, the longer the moral question of the piece sits in your head, the more connected to the characters you become. Given the fact that Saulnier is working with some of the best actors right now, the longer that he allows us to luxuriate in their faces, the better the movie gets. Hold the Dark is the type of film that is playing expressly in the realm of theme so the overall storytelling here doesn’t sway realistic. Therefore, by embracing the performances (and the great direction) the film succeeds to be a brutalistic and beautiful experience. It helps that, again, Saulnier is firing on all cylinders (pun intended). He has always been a genius at staging gory action and setting up situations for his characters to barely live through and here that is more than the case. The Alaskan wilderness provides the perfect backdrop for some surprising and terrifying action and as usual this action only bolsters the deeper themes.

The environment in Hold the Dark is used in much the same as it is in Wind River (though I’d argue that while that movie hoped for sympathy, Saulnier and Blair leave that at the door here), in that the brutal cold of the area, the remoteness traps people in and alters their minds. This eventually leads into the crux of the piece, whether or not it is easy to kill something. Whether or not, even in the context of good, a living being is allowed to die. This, as well as the aforementioned familial kindness thing (that would constitute a spoiler so I’ll not elaborate), allow Hold the Dark to carry more weight than any of Saulnier’s work. Sometimes too much. At times the brutal, unfeeling nature of the thing is a little bit overwhelming, cancelling out the drama onscreen. This doesn’t happen often though and often finds itself being later redeemed by a new, richer, scene.

Hold the Dark probably isn’t one of the best films of the year but it is a phenomenally bitter, violent work. It doesn’t reach the heights of Saulnier’s previous efforts but that’s not saying much. It still manages to move and explore just as effectively.

4 out of 5 Stars

HOLD THE DARK is currently streaming on Netflix