This is one of those movies that will have people say they either strongly like it for imagery and symbolism or hate it because it is tedious and confusing. What do I think of it? Well I am somewhere between those two groups of fans. Hold the Dark (2018) movie review
In its essence, “Hold the Dark” is a well made movie. From the beginning scene where we are introduced to some characters living in a snowy town in Alaska, you get a feeling people have it rough just to survive without bringing into the picture wolves who are taking away their children. It is a cold, dreary, dry, and isolated little place where nature makes the rules. It sets up this character driven piece that slowly spirels into chaos and madness.
Before everything goes south, we are introduced to Medora Sloane (Riley Keough) who plays a mother that lost her child to a presumably another wolf attack. She calls in a man named Russell Core (Jeffrey Wreight) who comes in to help her kill the animal that has taken her son. He quickly realizes that the town is a bit off as residents start to ignore his presence and are a bit standoff-ish. This really goes into a nose dive when Medora’s husband Vernon comes home from deployment. Everything about this tells you the story will involve a lot of interactions between these characters, with a splash of violence, distrust, and even some supernatural elements. However, IMO, it doesn’t.
With a runtime of over 2 hrs, the movie managed to end in a weird unexplained mess. A lot of the characters looked bored, cold, and almost dead in their performance. They didn’t feel engaged and were just there for the sake of being there. There were instances of good action (most notably the police shootout scene) with a lot of blood and gore scattered throughout. That is one thing I can’t complain about. However, things like supernatural elements were never explored deeply. You felt like people were getting killed just to pump up those body count numbers.
There was also a lot of confusion on people’s motivations. I was unsure why they were acting in a way that seemed unreasonable. It felt forced and unconvincing. There should have been a scene or two that explained their interests. Perhaps the movie wanted the audience to figure it out, but at least they should have given us one or two theories on what was driving these characters to act in such a way that seemed odd to the common folk. I don’t want everything to be spoon fed to me but give me something.
Overall the movie had some great ideas, some fantastic scenes of vast snowy landscapes. It also had some good bloody action scenes. Where it fails is wrapping all those ideas together. We don’t get to cheer for our main characters and feel like something grand was accomplished. Instead the movie ends with me having more questions that I thought possible. I thought the payout was weak and unimaginative. It was not satisfying at all. I was left with a lot of questions but most notably I was constantly asking myself why was this happening? If your movie can’t answer this question in 2hrs, I can safely say it was an overall failure to make it memorable.
Thanks for reading my Hold the Dark (2018) movie review
