I kept waiting and waiting for Hold the Dark to suddenly click into place for me, but that moment never came. Writer Macon Blair and director Jeremy Saulnier (the latter being the director behind one of 2016's best movies, Green Room) have delivered a feature that only gets more and more inert as it goes on as one gradually realizes that the slow-burn restrained atmosphere of the whole movie isn't going nowhere. Oh to go back to the start of the movie, when I still had hopes for this one realizing its potential. The beginning of Hold the Dark is easily the strongest part of the whole feature, as we're introduced to Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), an author who is contacted by Alaska resident Medora (Riley Keough) to help her find her son who was recently taken by wolves.
Russell travels to the frosty state to help offer Medora some form of closure, though he isn't wild about her idea of going out and killing the wolf that took her boy. In his initial time here, Saunier's gift as a visualist certainly is evident as he makes the eerie atmosphere of this location come through in just establishing shots of the snow-covered landscapes Russell is now surrounded by, I love how he subtly communicates that something is wrong to the core here in this small town just with a handful of shots. This early part of the story is also where the one truly intense sequence of Hold the Dark can be found in a depiction of Russell racing for his gun as a nearby wolf pack descends on him, the editing and sparsely implemented score really make your heart pound in this showstopper scene.
At the same time as Russell is arriving into town, Medora's soldier husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) is wounded in Iraq (the story takes place in 2004) and is now headed back home, where he's greeted with the news that Medora is actually the one who has killed their son. Now Vernon and some other residents of the tiny Alaskan town that have also lost their kids are out to hunt down Medora and are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. This is what drives the rest of the plot, with Russell having little to nothing do once Vernon goes on his mission of vengeance beyond engaging in one of Hold the Dark's numerous belabored conversations about the nature of man and what wickedness man is capable of that get about as deep as "Man can sure be mean sometimes, huh?"
That's about as insightful as Hold the Dark gets on the topic of how evil man can be but the movie itself mistakenly believes this is a weighty enough exploration of this idea that Hold the Dark must be told as a quiet contemplative drama so that the idea of "Man=Animal" can be told properly. The idea that men are capable of being evil shouldn't be a surprise if you've seen what the GOP has done in American politics basically at any point in post-1940 history, yet so much of its runtime is devoted to characters engaging in glacially-paced conversations wherein they rehash the idea of man being a monster over and over again with no fresh insight to offer. The concept of man being the real animal in a wilderness location is such a trite idea, the kind of thing a stoned College Freshman comes up with and thinks is an utter revelation, and Hold the Dark chooses to center its whole story and so much of its dialogue around it without ever really fleshing out this idea beyond maybe using Vernon using as an allegory for America's reaction to the September 11 attacks (personal tragedy struck him so now he's attacking anyone who gets in his path in a pursuit for the people actually responsible for said personal tragedy).
All of this is told in a grim atmosphere devoid of and even condemning of human kindness, along with prolonged sequences containing minimal on-screen activity, that all seems more fitting for a Bela Tarr movie, not a movie featuring Alexander Skarsgard donning a wolf mask to kill people (cuz he's a beast now, don'tcha know) like he's the Alaskan Michael Myers. Accompanying the pervasively morose aesthetic of Hold the Dark is a bevy of boring characters played by actors trying their best to make this tedious dialogue interesting. Skarsgard is probably giving the best performance in his intentionally disturbing portrayal of a man who sees violence as his only recourse of action, but nobody else here, including Russell Core, gets a personality to work with, a sharp contrast to Saulnier's Green Room which had vibrant personality coming out of even the most minimally seen supporting characters. There are no engaging characters to speak of and far too few engrossing suspenseful sequences around making one notice all the more just how little thought Hold the Dark is applying to its central theme.
This means that Hold the Dark just goes round and round in circles on its thinly-sketched interpretation of the idea of man being capable of being a monster before finally coming to a close. Instead of leaving the viewer with lots to chew on, I walked away from Hold the Dark merely confused and disappointed. There are a handful of elements that work here, but Hold the Dark is done in by focusing exclusively on a boring take on the idea of man being an animal and then proceeding to tell that take in a drawn-out ponderous manner of storytelling so slow that even the master of slow-burn cinema Chantal Akerman would have been telling Jeremy Saulnier and Macon Blair to speed things up a bit.
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