Hold the Dark (2018) Review

“Hold the Dark” Poster

Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough, Julian Black Antelope
Running Time: 125 min.

By Kyle Warner

In days like these, when seemingly every other person in Alaska has their own reality TV show and the powers that be plan to put oil pipelines all across the land, the state of Alaska is losing some of its rugged, dangerous appeal. But in the deep dark woods of the state, you can still find some of America as it once was, wild and natural and unknown. That’s where Hold the Dark takes place, in the pitiless wilds of Alaska where predators rule and industry has left the land largely untouched. Jeffrey Wright’s hunter is called in to explore the deep dark of the woods, looking for something menacing that lurks there. However, as Hold the Dark progresses, our understanding of the ‘dark’ changes, and the movie becomes less about exploring the deep dark of nature and more about the deep dark of the human heart.

The Sloane child is taken. The boy’s mother, Medora (Riley Keough), believes he is the latest in her small Alaskan village to be taken by wolves. When the search yields no results, Medora Sloane wants revenge, and calls upon nature writer Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) to come in and kill the wolf that took her son so that she will have at least something to show her husband when he returns from war. “I know you have sympathy for this animal. Please don’t,” she writes to Core. And indeed, Core is more of a man of nature than he is a hunter of it, but he agrees to help if he can. “Help explain what happened here.” From early on, Core has reason to believe that Medora isn’t all right, but he chalks this up to her dealing with grief in one of the loneliest places in the world. As Medora stares out the chilled glass of her little cabin, she asks Core, “Do you have any idea what’s outside those windows? How black it gets? How it gets in you?”

Medora’s husband, Vernon Sloane (Alexander Skarsgård), is introduced to us during his service in the Middle East. He is a cold, efficient soldier, who barely says a word. When he walks in on a fellow American soldier raping a local woman, Vernon calmly takes out his knife and stabs the man, then hands the knife to the woman for her to finish the job. A bullet wound knocks him out of the war and sends him home early, where upon he must face the news that his son is dead and his wife has suddenly gone missing.

Core is very much the audience’s surrogate, putting together the pieces, asking the right questions, and nervously continuing towards the darkness. And because of this, it is surprising how much of the film is yielded to Vernon Sloane and the local lawman played by James Badge Dale (who has never been better). It’s a quiet film full of implied meanings and dark questions (12 hours later I just thought up a holy shit possibility that changes everything, the details of which I cannot share for fear of ruining too much).

Hold the Dark keeps you at arm’s length for a very long time as you try to figure out just what it is. As a fan of director Jeremy Saulnier and a fan of man vs nature movies in general (go nature!), Hold the Dark has been on my radar for a long time. Watching the first trailer, I thought it was going to be a mix of The Grey and The Wicker Man. Well, it’s not that at all. It has so much genre DNA in the mix – adventure, thriller, action, horror, thriller, existential cosmic dread – that it’s a difficult movie to pin down as you’re watching it. On the surface, Hold the Dark is simpler than it seems at first. But once you dive below, you find that deep dark heart full of complexities and unanswered questions. There is a lot of subtext here, some of it horrifying. And because so much of the film lets its meaning be implied rather than stated, it is likely to lose some viewers along the way. It does end in a sort of ‘wait what?’ fashion but as I let the movie digest I came to appreciate this finale more.

The performances are largely very good. Jeffrey Wright (Casino Royale) has long been one of Hollywood’s most underappreciated actors and he sells Core’s everyman vulnerability well here as he is thrust into a mystery he’d really rather bow out of. James Badge Dale (Iron Man 3) has a cool, blue collar working man quality to him that reminds of Roy Scheider. He enters the film later than the rest of the main cast but takes over almost every scene he’s in without a need for chewing scenery. It’s a seemingly effortless performance. One scene in which Dale tries to talk down a suspect played by actor Julian Black Antelope (Blackstone) is one of the best acted scenes in 2018 cinema. Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road) continues a string of interesting supporting roles as the grieving and strange mother Sloane. I was less impressed by Alexander Skarsgård (Big Little Lies), who whispers his way through the movie. Skarsgård is better when he says nothing (which, to be fair, is pretty often), as he has a quiet stillness to him that makes his character’s cruelty seem all the more chilling.

Over his first three features, director Jeremy Saulnier was noticeably improving as a filmmaker with each new film. Blue Ruin was a big step up from Murder Party and Green Room was a big step up from Blue Ruin (I still consider Green Room the best film of 2016). It would be a bit unfair to call Hold the Dark a step back, but it is the first time where Saulnier’s newest film is not his new best film. That said, it is his most ambitious. Whereas his other films addressed the bloody darkness head-on, Hold the Dark is more ambiguous and (depending on the viewer) has the potential to say more, especially on repeat viewings. The screenplay is written by supporting actor and frequent Saulnier collaborator Macon Blair (I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.) based on a novel by William Giraldi. Blair continues to be one of the most interesting artists working in film as well, here crafting a great script while also providing one of the movie’s few laughs in his supporting role.

At the center of Hold the Dark is one of the bloodiest, ugliest shootouts in modern film memory. It is ultra-violent and horrific, joining a small but growing number of films that make gun violence into the stuff of horror movies. It’s incredible filmmaking, tense as hell. It’s also a peculiar moment that, if viewed in terms of plot, seems to take up a lot of time from the central story. But I feel that Hold the Dark is more about mood and theme than it is story, and as such the pitiless massacre of the shootout fits right in with the rest. A cold, merciless movie which ends with more than a few unanswered questions, Hold the Dark is bound to divide audiences. But if you’re in the right mood for this particular breed of darkness, there’s an interesting movie to explore.

Kyle Warner’s Rating: 7/10