The Netflix movie Hold the Dark, which was released briefly in theaters and debuted at the Toronto film festival, is a slow-burning mix of Jim Thompson-esque noir and psychological horror, set in the bleakest of American landscapes – a small Native American village somewhere in Alaska. Based on the novel by William Giraldi and directed by Jeremy Saulner (Green Room), the movie falls for a few cliches of the noir genre but keeps the tension high at virtually every point, eventually arriving at a climax that appears to have left many readers guessing at what it meant.
A writer and wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) gets a letter from an Alaska woman named Medora Sloane (Riley Keough), who says her son was kidnapped by wolves and asks Core to come find the wolf and kill it. He does, but things get weird almost immediately, when on his first night staying in her house, she appears nude, wearing a wolf mask, and lies down next to him while trying to get him to choke her. Her husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), is seen in graphic scenes of firefighting in Iraq, and is nearly killed, returning home to find his son dead and his wife by that point missing, which in turn sets off a string of violent shootings that envelop an unwilling Core in their web and the manhunt for Vernon that ensues. (Medora is the young woman who waits at home for her pirate captain lover Corrado on Verdi’s opera Il corsaro; she and Corrado both die at the end, because that’s just how things went in 19th century opera.)
Hold the Dark is decidedly, deliberately creepy, with barren white landscapes and wooden cabins with dark interiors, so that nearly all of the movie is a little hard on the eyes and leaves you unsettled regardless of what’s happening on the screen. Core is the central character, although the narrative does shift to follow Vernon on the lam, and much of the camera work tries to give you that same sense of dread and confusion that Core would be experiencing as he’s exploring the Sloanes’ basement or is caught in a firefight with cops and a suspect. There’s a lot of graphic violence – almost every shooting involves blood and flesh flying from the body, certainly more than anyone really needs to see here – but the most powerful on-screen deaths are the ones that occur with little or no warning. Core is a witness to nearly all of them, and his reactions, coupled with the trouble he has coping with the short daylight hours of the Alaskan winter (it’s near the solstice, so the days are just five or so hours long), infuse the film with a sense of permanent unease, like the world is spinning just a tick faster than normal and you can’t find your footing.
Wright is especially apt for his role, as the grey in his beard and his overall mien convey seriousness and an implacability that will be quickly tested by the events of the story, and he has the deep, sonorous voice that can work even as the characters are mumbling. There is a lot of mumbling, though, which struck me as a too-hard attempt to give the movie that noir feel – it’s all serious, we’re serious, a little violence won’t even change the cadence of our speech – when the plot itself should do that. This is dark noir, like Thompson or even some James Cain, where no character is safe and thus you don’t feel like you can anchor yourself to anyone in the film. Even Keough tries to join in, with a vacant, affect-less speech that makes her sound more strung-out than anything else (exacerbated by makeup that makes it look like she hasn’t slept in a long time – which would fit her character’s arc).
The sky and the dark are frequent themes and characters mention them several times, both as a metaphor for the psychosis that appears to have gripped some of the characters in the film and as a literal reference to the effect that the wide open spaces and pervasive darkness can have on people who are already living isolated lives. The wolf mask and several scenes with wolves acting in what appear to be counterintuitive ways speak to the fact that we are animals at heart, and the story seems to ask whether we are really all that able to suppress the animal instincts within us. There’s also a subtext here, never spelled out but to which the dialogue alludes a few times (and with one picture), that I shouldn’t mention for fear of spoiling the ending, although apparently this is clearer in the book (I did not think it was very clear), but it’s important to fully understand what Hold the Dark is trying to achieve. If you can stand the violence – and I would say this was on the edge of what I tolerate – it’s a really gripping, dark vision into humanity on the edge of civilization, and most of the film lives up to the tension of a good thriller.
(One warning: there’s a rape scene near the start of the movie that isn’t explicit but makes it very clear what’s happening. The scene is shot strangely anyway, but I thought a trigger warning was justified.)