3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Hold the Dark

2018, Jeremy Saulnier (Rebel Ridge) -- Netflix

No, this wasn't swallowed by the hiatus of 2018, I just never got around to watching it, and it came out in October which was dedicated to horror movies. Kent did, exploring it as Horror Not Horror. And just recently, I decided to poke a pin in my Watchlist and pressed Start. 

Saulnier doesn't have a large body of work. It started with the very indie Murder Party almost 20 years ago but got noticed with Blue Ruin. I have only seen Green Room and the recent Netflix dear, Rebel Ridge. Even with this minimal exposure, its clear the man makes movies about violence and violent people. 

Alaska. Medora Slone (Riley Keough, Logan Lucky) has asked writer & wolf-expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright, Westworld) to come and deal with the wolves that have taken her son, and two other children, from the remote village of Keelut. Medora is a shadowed figure, all trauma, who unnerves Core with her talk about the Alaskan long nights, the cold and her wolf-mask... the spontaneous nudity doesn't help. She tells him this needs to be settled before her husband comes back from war. Core does set out, but doesn't have many hours of daylight to work with, and he is not convinced this is wolf behaviour. He witnesses them eating their own young, but does not shoot when given the chance. When he returns, Medora is gone, and her son's body is in the basement. No wolf took him; she strangled him with her own hands.

The not so local authorities are involved, including Detective Marium (James Bade Dale, World War Z; I assume he is a detective, but in this environment, he just appears as a high ranking member of the state police) who inform Core that Medora's husband will be returning imminently, having been wounded. We get a brief scene where we see Vernon Slone (Alexander Skarsgård, Mute), overseas, murder a fellow soldier after finding him raping a local; he is wounded immediately after. After his arrival back in Alaska, there is discomfort between Slone and the police, with Core caught in the middle, which explodes in surprising violence -- Vernon shoots two police officers, takes his son's body and disappears into the wilderness. He will find his wife on his own terms and apparently doesn't want anyone else involved.

This act of violence is followed by an even greater one, as Marium and the authorities descend on Keelut to detain Vernon's best friend, who they know was involved. His response is to open up with automatic weapons on the arriving police, cutting most of them down horribly, while Core can do nothing but hide and witness. He is not a cowardly man, and tries to intervene, given a chance to rise above the impotence he feels from the recent events. But Marium eventually takes down Vernon's friend.

We are Core. We are witness to extreme violence, isolation and the darkness that Medora spoke of. Night comes early and everyone seems battered down by it.

The remainder of the movie has Core and Marium tracking the Slones to a hot spring cave deep in the wilderness, the one place Medora claimed to have felt warmth. But before that, we get a moment where Vernon tracks her to a closed-mine-turned-quaint-roadside-inn where another small piece of the puzzle of violence falls into place. 

Chilling spoilers hereafter.

Long ago Vernon's own father brought him here, to be treated by a shaman who lives on the premises. Something about wolves-oil. The thing is that, in the movie, I don't believe the puzzle is clear. We know a few things. Vernon and Medora have known each other their whole lives -- a picture of the two as children, very happy, very blonde. We get flashbacks of Vernon teaching his emotionless son how to hunt deer. They talk about killing, killing people. We get a bit of the darkness Medora spoke of. But what we don't get, or at least I didn't, was that Vernon and Medora were brother and sister. You'd think the village would be a bit more adverse to that, that such a history would come up as the police talked about her murder of her own son. Its possible they don't know, that the small village of Keelut kept its dark secrets to themselves. What we are also left to postulate was that the children of the village were not taken by wolves, but by Medora's own son. She strangled him to end the cycle there, likely hoping her husband would kill her as well.

He doesn't. Core and Marium do track the couple to the caves, where Vernon surprises them, killing Marium silently with a compound bow, as Core rushes to warn Medora, before taking an arrow himself. His final vision before unconsciousness is the two kissing and leaving together. Vernon leaves Core alive, barely, before he is rescued by some locals. But just before Core is rescued, he is surrounded by the wolves he did not shoot earlier in the movie. They do not tear him apart.

The movie ends with Core recovering in hospital, his estranged daughter at his bedside.

Violence, tragedy, horrible acts, the bone chilling cold. Movies like this are not supposed to have a point but have us experience something, and have us react to it. So many people in the movie temper their emotional reactions to everything, but as we watch Core watch this unfold, we can feel it creeping up within in him, a scream desperate to get out. He lets it fuel his need to reconnect with his lost daughter, a final act of life amidst all that witnessed death and loss.

Wright is always watchable. He carries darkness well. Saulnier is able to give us a chilling movie, but to be honest, I don't think the Long Night was as impactful here as I have seen it in other stories, such as True Detective: Night Country. I guess the idea is that people can be colder than weather.