Hold the Dark – first look review

Jere­my Saulnier makes films about the dark­er side of human nature. His pre­vi­ous fea­tures, Blue Ruin and Green Room, deal with a vagrant’s quest for revenge and a band caught up with a group of mur­der­ous Neo-Nazis respec­tive­ly, so it stands to rea­son that his third fea­ture should cov­er equal­ly shock­ing ground: wolves with a taste for human flesh.

Hold the Dark is not real­ly about the wolves, though. As the title sug­gests, it’s about the dark. Set in a dis­tant and des­per­ate part of Alas­ka, the film opens with Medo­ra Sloane (Riley Keough) pen­ning a let­ter to wolf expert Rus­sell Core (Jef­frey Wright) plead­ing him to vis­it her and kill the wolves that have tak­en her young son, Bai­ley, before her hus­band Ver­non (Alexan­der Skars­gård) returns from Iraq. It quick­ly becomes clear to Core that things are not all they seem for the Sloane fam­i­ly, and he becomes hope­less­ly embroiled in their affairs as the phys­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal dark­ness clos­es in.

Writ­ten by reg­u­lar Saulnier col­lab­o­ra­tor Macon Blair, Hold the Dark feels very dif­fer­ent from the work which brought the direc­tor to the atten­tion of genre fans. Although boast­ing the high­est body count of any of his films so far, the vio­lence here feels more engrained in the set­ting and char­ac­ters – it’s a way of life in the des­o­late cor­ner of the world where the sto­ry takes place.

It’s also the only lan­guage that Ver­non Sloane seems to under­stand. Skars­gård gives a men­ac­ing per­for­mance, rely­ing on hard stares and body lan­guage (his char­ac­ter isn’t much of a talk­er). Mean­while, Wright is per­fect­ly cast as a man thrust into some­thing beyond his under­stand­ing, but deter­mined to not give up or mere­ly walk away. He’s drawn to the dark­ness and con­sumed by his fas­ci­na­tion with it.

Those look­ing for the jaw-drop­ping ultra­vi­o­lence may be left dis­ap­point­ed, as Hold the Dark is more an explo­ration of the human con­di­tion than a straight-up hor­ror film. Yet when it does come, the vio­lence is as heart-pound­ing­ly gris­ly as we’ve come to expect from Saulnier. He cer­tain­ly knows how to shoot action, and how to show it in a way that feels real­is­tic and dev­as­tat­ing. This is a moody, twist­ed dra­ma from the fringes of Amer­i­can soci­ety, once more exam­in­ing the more depraved extent of human cru­el­ty with haunt­ing results.