Hold The Dark: The Wolf In Man

If you look into the eyes of a predator, like a shark or a wolf, you see nothing reflected back. No intelligence, no recognition, no connection. Their eyes are utterly blank, and their minds unknowable. Their frame of reference is not ours, and though they are creatures of this earth, they are completely alien. There is no understanding there.

I’ve watched a decent number of films that deal with nature at its most implacable and merciless, films that go on to draw connections and comparisons between animal and human predators, but I don’t know that I’ve watched one that so fully embodies that thesis as much as Hold The Dark does. It’s somber, relentlessly grim, taking that unknowability and extending it into the world of humans.

This begins as the story of Medora Slone, a woman who lives in the remote Alaskan village of Keelut. It’s a very small, very poor village whose inhabitants never really recovered from the loss of two of their children, taken by wolves. It is a village draped in bitterness and despair, a dark place where the sun rises at 10:30am and sets by 3:30pm. And now, Medora’s son Bailey is the third child to be taken. She writes to a naturalist named Russell Core, an expert on wolf behavior who has some expertise in tracking down wolves who have taken children. She doesn’t expect Bailey to still be alive, but she wants Core to find the wolf that took him and kill it. It’s simple: She’s a mother, and she wants revenge. Her husband is far away, fighting in the Iraqi desert, and she wants to have something to show for all their tragedy when he comes home.

And then her husband comes home, and everything changes.

It’s an odd sort of comparison, but this film sort of feels to me like The Sweet Hereafter by way of a Jim Thompson novel. The people of Keelut have largely given up on life, paralyzed by their grief, and that comes out in different ways in different people - sometimes resignation, sometimes contempt, sometimes violent rage. It begins as one type of story, but then things take a turn, or several turns, really, and does so very quickly. It isn’t long before Core, our putative protagonist, ends up less an investigator and more a bystander witnessing everything that follows, as if something inexorable has been set into motion.

It’s a cold, wintry film - not just in the monolithically forbidding Alaska landscape, but also in the people, and the pacing. Medora is a ghost, pale and withdrawn, barely speaking above a whisper but every word brimming with rage. Russell is reticent, quiet, a man whose life has estranged him from his wife and daughter for reasons that are never really articulated. He’s reluctant to do what Medora asks, but he wants to help. The dialogue comes slowly and haltingly, with lots of air in between words and sentences. Almost everyone is taciturn, because there’s not much to say out here in the middle of nowhere. The homes we visit are, for the most part, crude and ramshackle, tacked together from scrap wood and plastic sheeting. There may be heating, but there’s little warmth, and the resentment the largely-indigenous population of Keelut feels for the White police officers who’ve come in from town is palpable. The pace suits this mood - it’s slow and deliberate, with long stretches of quiet punctuated by sudden, startling upheavals of violence. Much like nature itself, everything is stillness interrupted by blood. And it is definitely a violent film, with death coming quick, sharp, and unsentimental whether by man or beast (if there’s a distinction to be made, which this film suggests maybe there isn’t). It’s matter-of-fact and spares few. Someone’s alive, then they aren’t. The camera doesn’t linger, but nor does it look away.

There’s something elusive about this film - you think it’s going to be one thing, and then it’s another, but then it’s not really that either. The dialogue is spare (except for Medora, who waxes spookily lyrical) and we have to glean a lot from conversation, read between the lines and pay attention to subtle allusion and what goes unsaid. There are hints of mysticism and ancient mystery as indigenous beliefs collide with more rational explanations, and the film doesn’t really affirms one narrative more than another. There’s not a lot of overt exposition here, and so we’re left with the feeling that there are unsolved mysteries or untold stories just beyond our grasp as the film ends. That can be compelling, and it is here at points, but at other points, especially toward the climax, it tends to feel a little baffling and disappointing as well. Again, you think you know what it’s about, but it’s not that after all, so you’re left wondering what it was all for, and though that’s even forecasted by one of the characters early on when they say that they may never know the real answers, there’s something about it that gnaws at you once it’s over. There’s a lot of ambition here, and it’s well-directed, but this reliance on mystery, on elliptical storytelling, and on preserving the unknowability of nature does leave it feeling somewhat attenuated and distant in the final analysis.

On the other hand, it’s beautifully realized, with gorgeous cinematography - lots of shows of sun breaking through cracks in the clouds, mountain ranges, expanses of forests contrasted with the ramshackle villages and camps stuck into the wilderness in spite of its best efforts to shake them off. It’s largely dark or overcast, exteriors mostly drained of color and interiors mostly lit by lamplight. The soundtrack is largely ambient, as gray and forbidding as the world it scores. The people are more characters than fully fleshed-out individuals, but not to the detriment of the story. You get a sense of them and what matters to them, and though most people in this film are remote or unknowable, that sort of seems to be the point. There are occasional flashes of humanity, warmth among the cold, but in the end you don’t get any clear answers as to why everything that’s happened went down the way it did. The people of this world are as unknowable as the wolves that haunt the edges of the story. Spend long enough in the wilderness, this film says, and you will come to have more in common with the wilderness than you do other people.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix