Stay in the Light

By Tom Pacak

It leaves me with great sadness to inform you all that Jeremy Saulnier made a bad movie. This is the guy responsible for two of the best thrillers in recent memory (Green Room and Blue Ruin). In fact, I liked those films a lot! They had characters that go through the obstacles of survival with reason. In “Hold the Dark,” Jeremy Saulnier explores those same themes but without a purpose.  It seems at first that the vengeful husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård) has a justifiable motive for his killing spree. But once the film progresses, it falls flat.

The film opens up with wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), he’s called in to investigate the disappearances of three small children in Keelut, a small village in Alaska. One of the good things about this film is how Saulnier and cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck portray Alaska as a place of death.  The children weren’t murdered by humans but by dangerous wolves. The mother of one of the children, Medora Slone (Riley Keough) wants revenge on these wolves. “Hold the Dark,” presses the themes of killing your own blood for survival. When Russell finds the wolves he thinks are responsible, he sees them eating a baby wolf. Desperate times call for desperate measures for acts of survival.

Things get worse when the laconic Vernon returns from war after getting shot. At first, we get the impression that Vernon may be a good guy. He kills another soldier who was raping an Iraqi woman, a violent act that everyone would see as justified. Once he returns home, Vernon goes off. He starts going through a killing spree in order to find his wife, who has mysteriously disappeared. He kills cops, witch women, and even some innocent bystanders get their day with Vernon. Skarsgård, for most of the film, just walks around like a brainless zombie. The role doesn’t require a lot of acting. We get continuous scenes of Skarsgård killing people. It doesn’t look fun for him and it certainly isn’t any fun for the audience. All of the other actors also sleepwalk through their roles. Jeffery Wright isn’t convincing enough as the well-intended expert on wolves. The only actor to actually pull out a convincing performance is James Badge Dale, a police chief set on finding Vernon and retiring once he finds him.

After watching “Hold the Dark,” I was immediately reminded of Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River,” a better film about the dangers of sexual assault on Indian reservations. Like “Hold the Dark,” that film portrayed Wyoming where anybody could die from murder and the cold. It also included characters that go through a serious trauma and don’t come out the same again. In “Hold the Dark,” these characters just walk around waiting for something happen. The sad thing is nothing does happen. We get a cool shootout sequence towards the middle of the film but that’s it. My advice, watch “Wind River” as a substitute for “Hold the Dark.”

Note: Now Streaming on Netflix

Rating: 1.5 stars out of 4 stars