Directed by:
Jeremy SaulnierScreenplay:
Macon BlairCinematography:
Magnus Nordenhof JønckCast:
Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough, Beckam Crawford, Macon Blair, Jonathan Whitesell, Tantoo Cardinal, Conor Boru (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
A child is missing. His home is one of a handful of trailers on the edge of the wilderness. His father (Alexander Skarsgård) is serving in the Middle East and his mother (Riley Keough) seems to be succumbing to cabin fever. She calls in Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), a writer and expert on wolves; she believes the creatures took her boy and hopes Core can find him. Core accepts the mission as a pretext to visit his estranged daughter in Anchorage, but quickly realizes he's taken on a stranger and more sinister task that he could have anticipated. He finds himself in the middle of both a long-simmering dispute between a disenfranchised Indigenous community and the local authorities, and a mass-murder investigation. (Toronto International Film Festival)
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Reviews (7)
The ending doesn’t exactly make perfect sense in the context of the characters’ previous
motivations, but after all the dark, rationally incomprehensible lupine occultism of the Alaskan
wilderness, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the course of the relatively long, roughly
drawn story is continuously exciting and captivatingly atmospheric with constant surprising plot
twists. I was drawn into it, just like in the case of Wind River, in which, however, everything had a
logical place and the plot was precisely taken to a more coherent and thoughtful ending.
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I guess I expected a perfect viewing experience from the snowy American North, similar to Wind River, but Hold The Dark didn’t quite meet my expectations. The landscape was there, and everyone must admit that snow in detective stories complements the atmosphere well; I can’t fault the film on that account. The actors also delivered commendably, with local police officer James Badge Dale being a surprise. However, the story and the plot just didn’t help much; I was expecting something more refined and convincing. Instead, I got a mix of disgruntled locals, some local mythology, and a few murders. In the end, it didn’t come together at all, resulting in a sudden and especially open-ended conclusion (which was the most frustrating part). A few scenes, where brutality was definitely not held back, pulled the film out of the average gray zone (the impressive M60 vs police squad shootout is a rare sight in films), but it had the potential to become a brilliant genre piece. I give it 65%.
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Over the time, I’m discovering that Netflix doesn’t mean only good movies. Sometimes it also means average movies and sometimes even bad ones. However, Hold the Dark fortunately belongs among the better part of Netflix production. It has a solid atmosphere, and if it didn’t last more than two hours, the audience wouldn’t have the time to be bored. But as it is, there are moments when the characters act like retards or worse. In the second half of the film, it however gains some pleasant momentum and the ending is nice. The action finale makes it into better average; without it, I might have thought that someone was trying to make a rip-off of Wind River. When watching this film, I didn’t know yet that ‘rip-off’ is Netflix’s favorite word.
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After Blue Ruin and Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier comes up with another tough and manly indie flick that definitely deserves attention. The comparisons to Wind River are spot on. The film is set in the harsh environment of Alaska and literally spews coldness and chills in every frame. The main character played by Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) is a wolf expert called in to track down a boy who has been taken by wolves, but he soon discovers that there is more to this than meets the eye. The downside is the rather slower pace, which mainstream audiences may well not enjoy, and the fact that the story is rather strangely contrived and not all the questions are answered, which I personally don't really like either, but it is still a film that has a lot to offer. If you know the director, you know that he is no stranger to violence and gore, and he serves up some very nice shots in a few scenes. On the plus side, the performances are also great, with Alexander Skarsgård rocking and the Alaskan landscape with the wolves is more than attractive. Unconventional, but decent, especially for Netflix. 75%.
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An atmospheric thriller that excels with excellent action scenes and a slightly demonic Alexander Skarsgård. Comparisons to Wind River may be fitting in terms of the locations chosen and the murder mystery plot, but otherwise Hold the Dark forges its own path and is more of a meditative thriller with mystery elements than a murder mystery. The plot is told very slowly, but there are some really intense passages and the whole narrative is interestingly framed with metaphors. It's just a pity that the final impression was a bit weaker than I initially expected.
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