On Hold the Dark

Jeremy Saulnier's new film, Hold the Dark, which is available on Netflix is bigger in ambition than he previous two features, Blue Ruin (2013) and Green Room (2015), which were set, respectively, in a small town and an isolated bar. Both these films were impressive exercises in restraint; they were relatively low budget and action was constrained often to small spaces, allowing Saulnier to display great skill in creating fear, tension and shocks in closed environments. This is especially true of Green Room, but much of Blue Ruin's suspense came in the small spaces of cars, houses, basements. These two films also clocked in around 90 minutes, whereas Hold The Dark just pushes the two hour mark. Bigger in size as well as ambition.

Hold the Dark (perhaps acting as an audition for Saulnier's directing work on the upcoming True Detective Season 3), focuses on ideas of cult and ritual. It is set in the Alaskan wilderness, making a point of saying that Anchorage does not count as real Alaska and includes a backstory that involves Fallujah in Iraq. Despite the intimacy of the story, its setting is vast. The cinematography is stunning, especially in Alaska where the landscape is shown to engulf the characters, whether they travel by foot or, in a beautiful piece of photography, plane.

Hold the Dark is a curious film. It seems to want to explore ancient mythologies of the wolf, but features the animal very little and makes little of threat the film suggests they are. These mythologies involve the manner in which certain members of this small community have adopted wolf like behaviour, although why is never made clear. Yet, there is plenty of killing, much of it graphic, in the name of the wolf and their way of life. In many ways it seems to do a disservice to the animal. If it is meant to be respectful, or reverent, which is the manner in which Jeffrey Wright's character seems to hold the animal, then this is unclear.

The central mystery focuses on the disappearance of a mother who has killed her son and blamed wolves, then brought in a wolf expert (Wright) on the lie she wants him to kill the wolf responsible, yet actually he is there to find the son's body. This threads of this never add up. Wright's wolf expertise seems to rest on a book he has written about killing a female wolf, but his expertise is never displayed. He mentions the direction once and that wolves at times eat their young, but that's it. His briefly glimpsed home contains images and paintings of wolves, and why he would want to kill another is the Alaskan outback is strange; his explanation that he wants to be near his Anchorage base daughter never sits as realistic. If, as he says, he does it to help with a mother's grief, why he sticks around after she brushes up to him, naked, in a terrifying wolf mask and makes him throttle her is anyone's guess. That is the true mystery here. He has no character to work with, just a presence that Wright brings with him and this is not enough. Yes, Wright did wonders with the contemplative, almost mute Bernard in Westworld (2016 -), but that doesn't mean he can fill in the gaping holes of his character here. There seems to be no reasonable explanation of why Wright's character actually exists.

The order of events, or the motivation for them is unclear and, this maybe acceptable for the characters who are meant to be mysterious, some explanation should in the end be offered. And it is not. That the body is stolen, buried and then dug up by the father returning from war begs the question why the mother and father, both believers in killing their young son, don't do it together, rather than create this whole murder/mystery unnecessarily. Simply, there are too many questions that make this not mysterious, but confusing.

Despite all of this, Hold the Dark is oddly watchable. The assumption that all of this is leading somewhere, not necessarily towards closure, but to some understanding, encourages one to stay with it. Plus, the atmosphere created early on is eerie and unsettling, but at the same time the landscape is beautiful. These contradictions are interesting. Saulnier clearly had in his head an ambition that he was aiming for with Hold the Dark and perhaps he can explain the strange and confusing motivations or narrative order. Unfortunately, for the rest of is, the end result is disappointing.