The movie that cried wolf but no one answered
Shambolic, violent Hold the Dark promises more than it can deliver
Where is Liam Neeson when you need him? Everyone knows that when wolves threaten an Alaskan town and carry off its children, you hire the guy who took down a pack of them in 2011’s The Grey with nothing more than broken bottles taped to his fingers.
Everyone knows that except director Jeremy Saulnier, who hires Jeffrey Wright to play the expert in all things lupine (the canine critters, not the flowers). Wright’s character, Russell Core, gets a plaintive message from Medora Slone (Riley Keough), whose son has just been taken. Taken? Sounds like a job for ...
Neesonlessness notwithstanding, it’s a compelling opening. Russell arrives in Medora’s fictional hometown, which is so far north he refers to his estranged daughter being “down in Anchorage.”
But Medora speaks in riddles and accosts him in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a wooden wolf mask. Something ’s amiss.
Actually, a whole mess of things are amiss, and the longer you stick with Hold the Dark, the more you’ll realize that when a local cop (James Badge Dale), says, “I’m not convinced the answers exist,” he’s speaking for all of us.
Here’s what we know for sure: Medora’s husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), has been on a tour of duty in Iraq — the film is set in 2004 — and returns to news that his son is gone. Then his wife goes missing. He responds with a barrage of antipolice violence because ... well, to be honest, we’ve left the territory
of “what we know” at this point. And we won’t be coming back.
Vernon’s buddy Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope), joins him in his violent quest, but with everyone speaking in gnomic roundaboutese it’s never quite clear what the goal is. Not only are the wolves pretty much forgotten; so are the missing children. There’s a firefight that lasts so long it needs an intermission. Tantoo Cardinal pops up as a wise First Nations woman and seems to have something important to say, but the screenplay by Macon Blair cuts her short.
Hold the Dark, which sounds like a strange sandwich order, is beautifully shot; the contrast between the gloomy Alaskan winter and the scenes in Iraq are particularly striking. And Wright retains his always-watchability, nursing a psychic wound that suggests he’s more at home with wolves than people.
So the blame for this one has to land on Saulnier, and all the more so because his last film, 2015’s Green Room, was such a fantastic elevation of what could have been a forgettable horrorgenre entry. Hold the Dark is having a limited theatrical release, but if you want to watch it I’d recommend streaming; if you decide it’s a howler, you’re a click away from leaving.