Frigid Alberta landscape shines in dark indie flick
How indie auteur Jeremy Saulnier went epic for his Alberta-shot Netflix thriller
When Jeremy Saulnier was shooting Hold the Dark in Kananaskis Country last winter, he would often take a minute or two to just breathe in his surroundings.
It became a regular ritual for the American filmmaker, who up until this point tended to shoot his low-budget films with a ruthless, head-down efficiency.
“I would literally flop down in my snowsuit, back into the snow, and just look up at the sky and mountains and just take a few minutes, which I’ve never done before,” says Saulnier, speaking with Postmedia from the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film had its star-studded premiere. “The environment inspired me to actually find very limited pockets where I could actually slow down and just be grateful. It was a huge help going forward.”
It all paints a calm, harmonious scene of an indie director finding inner peace on the mountainside amid the chaos and tumult of a wilderness film shoot.
Perhaps. But that’s actually contrary to the tone of Hold the Dark itself, which begins streaming on Netflix this Friday. As beautiful as Alberta’s mountainous vistas are — and they are stunning in the film — they actually take on a sinister, hostile vibe as the backdrop for Saulnier’s lyrical bloodbath of a movie.
Filmed in the Kananaskis, Calgary, Lethbridge, Drumheller and Morley in early 2017, Hold the Dark convincingly casts Alberta as the Alaskan wilderness. Troubled writer Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) arrives in a impoverished village at the behest of Medora (Riley Keough), a mysterious young mother who wrote to him because she read in his book that he once killed a wolf. She wants him to hunt down a pack of wolves that seem to be taking and killing village children, including her missing son. It doesn’t take long for Core to realize that something else is amiss in this strange little outpost. Eventually, Medora’s soldier husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) returns home from the Iraq war and chaos ensues.
There’s much more to it, of course, but Hold the Dark is the sort of film where revealing anything beyond its jumping-off point risks spoiling the visceral impact of its many twists. Suffice to say, the film does not shy away from graphic violence, which is a hallmark of Saulnier’s work. But it’s also cryptic, unsettling and poetic in its exploration of animal instinct, family and humanity’s darkest impulses. On top of that, it offers Calgary actor Julian Black Antelope a riveting and meaty role as one of Vernon’s friends. As with many Alberta-shot projects, the cold almost becomes a character in itself. You can almost feel the frost in every frame.
It is Saulnier’s fourth feature and certainly his most ambitious. The 41-year-old filmmaker, who was recently enlisted to direct episodes for Season 3 of HBO’s True Detective, has earned a reputation for scrappy and exceptionally violent low-budget cinema. That includes his 2013 revenge-thriller Blue Ruin and 2016’s critically acclaimed cult
film Green Room, which pitted a punk band against a gang of vicious neo-Nazis led by Patrick Stewart.
Hold the Dark is the first time Saulnier has directed a film not based on his own original concept. Adapted from William Giraldi’s New York Times bestseller, the story and setting offered what the filmmaker calls a “cinematic breath of fresh air” after the claustrophobic Green Room, which mostly took place in a locked punkrock club outside of Portland.
“By design, I keep my original concepts contained so that I can possibly shoot them myself with very limited resources,” he says. “In this case, I could not pass up the opportunity to do so many firsts as a filmmaker: whether it be choreographed aerial sequences; working with a fantastic ensemble cast with these amazing words written for them; or working with wolves, bison, lynx; or shooting my first war sequence in Morocco; or really utilizing the environment and the wide-open to tell a story.”
Saulnier told Entertainment Weekly that Hold the Dark has the highest body count of any of his films. which is no small feat given the carnage found in Blue Ruin and Green Room. But Wright, an Emmy-winning actor most recently seen in HBO’s Westworld, says he believes it’s also the filmmaker’s most intimate work. Unlike in the book, much of Russell Core’s backstory is kept ambiguous in the film. There are hints of a troubled past and an estrangement from his daughter and family. But even when it is never completely spelled out, the actor’s nuanced performance exudes a certain weariness and regret.
“We’re trying to build a pretty savage world in this film,” Wright says.
“But that savageness is a foil against the journey of Russell Core, who is clearly a broken man and a broken man who has been undone by his own relationship to violence having had to kill a wolf who was reported to have killed a young child in a national park in the U.S. All of the mayhem and depravity that he finds himself thrust into when he arrives to assist this young woman find her child really serves as a crucible through which he has to survive, through which he has to escape whole. I think his inner decency provides the context through which we perceive this violence. So, it’s in no way a glorification. In fact, I think it hopes to be the opposite.”
Wright has no complaints about his time spent in the frigid mountains.
“We wanted the elements to be present.We wanted the steam vapour to push from the mouth with each breath and we wanted to have driving snow. ”
The environment inspired me to actually find very limited pockets where I could actually slow down and just be grateful.