Hello folks, Graig here. Meesa back! I've been doing most of my reviews over in the Letterboxd app this year. I had intended to port the reviews over into ye olde blogge once Toast started posting regularly again, alas, time, energy and remembering to do so have all been obstacles. The reviews I'm posting here will be a little different than whats in the Letterboxd app...cleaned up at minimum, perhaps rebuilt entirely. Who knows.
My return will be the October-relevant theme of "Horror, Not Horror" in which I watch movies that toe the line of being horror movies but aren't quite there. And maybe the odd one will actually be horror. Who knows...
and now, the Netflix original Hold The Dark
2018, d. Jeremy (Green Room, Blue Ruin) Saulnier -- Netflix
I quite liked Saulnier's Blue Ruin (at least I recall liking it) and I've only realized recently that Green Room is his as well (long has it been sitting in my netflix queue, it's been bumped up the list). The combo of Saulnier and Jeffrey Wright immediately caught my interest when I spied the trailer on YouTube a few months, despite the fact that it looked like a possible variant of The Grey.
The film opens with yet another disappearance of a child in a remote Alaskan community, believed to have been taken by a wolf. The mother (Riley Keough) petitions Wright - an author whose biography was largely about his taking revenge on a wolf - to help track the animal and kill it. Wright takes the call, ventures North, but with the dual purpose of reconnecting with his estranged daughter nearby. Very quickly Wright suspects things are awry with the woman's story, and her homestead, confirmed when he returns to find her missing herself after his first day's hunt. Which is when her husband (Alexander Skarsgard) returns injured from war in the middle east. The hunting of wolves turns more metaphorical from herein, as Skarsgard begins tracking his wife, and Wright can't help but pick at the scab of mystery.
I'll put it out there, anything with Jeffrey Wright is worth watching,
at least for Jeffrey Wright. A brooding intensity simmering over an
inherent warmth, a voice that's calculated but reassuring, a look of
curiousity and of wisdom. The man is a treasure, and he doesn't get
enough spotlight features like Hold The Dark.
This film
is, I put it bluntly, very watchable but utterly unsatisfying in it's
finale. In the end, what is it trying to say? I tried to hazard a few guesses but
they fell apart immediately. It's curiously constructed, with aspects
that shouldn't work (like a gut wrenching 20 minute standoff/massacre about halfway through)
and yet it all works somehow, pulling the viewer through it's obtuse
metaphor in fits and starts.
I was fascinated by the film, what it was
doing, and why, my brain working overtime trying to understand why I was
seeing what I was seeing, and yet I never quite got there. When my
brain would want to give up, the gorgeous cinematography would distract
it long enough to give it a break, the the story would draw it back in
and put it back to work.
The cast is pretty great, Wright,
obviously, Keough, Skarsgard, Julian Black Antelope,
James Badge Dale and even the minor supporting cast, all deliver in the
desolation of Alaska where everyone seems to be sleepwalking, but some more accustomed to it than others.
I
enjoyed the film tremendously, it engaged me right up until it's last
moments when I realized that I had no clue what it was trying to say. It's not necessarily about human nature, or about hunting, or man's relationship with the environment. It touches on our treatment of each other, class and racial conflict, but it does not assume these are simple topics and does not choose to address them simply. The relationship between Keough and Skarsgard is particularly troublesome in trying to comprehend, the film insinuation they're more animals in some regards, but it's not clear on what it means against everything else going on. I'm not sure if a rewatch is going to help. Perhaps I need to read
the book.
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