For the past few years I've had this nagging feeling that I was forgetting something. I had a lot on my mind from 2016 through last year, so it was probably more than just one thing. I'm sure a lot of stuff slipped through the cracks, especially when I was on my downward booze spiral that really began in earnest in 2020. And then I saw Outlaw Vern's review of Hold the Dark. Of course! The new(ish) Jeremy Saulnier film! I'd meant to see it and then lost track of it.
I love Saulnier's films ever since I saw Murder Party. If I knew where you lived in the first year following the night I saw that one, then I forced you to watch it. No one ever regretted it. Blue Ruin and Green Room are fucking great. How did I keep forgetting to watch Hold the Dark?!
I didn't read the review. I love Vern's work (and once upon a time he did an intro to an anthology I was in called Straight to Video), but I know that while he warns when he's about to talk spoilers, I didn't want to risk my eyes wandering.
So I watched the movie, and it's great. The mood is perfect. It's an odd movie. I'm not even sure I can describe it accurately. A boy is stolen by a pack of wolves in the Alaskan wilderness, and his mother asks a guy who wrote a book about killing a wolf (played by Jeffrey Wright!) to find her son and kill the wolf who did this. There is the complication of the boy's father (Alexander Skarsgard) coming home from being injured in the war (Afghanistan, maybe?) and from there the movie really goes off the rails. Like, even for me, and you all know how I like it when shit goes off the rails.
Then I read Vern's review, and I was relieved that I wasn't the only one who didn't understand it. I'd watched it while I was high, so I was wondering if maybe I missed something, but no. There's something going on in this movie that I'd like to understand but I don't. Maybe, like Vern suggests, the answers are in the book the film is based on. So I'll probably get that, too.
But it's a wild ride. There's an oddball shootout that ends so strangely that I couldn't help but laugh. There's something with . . . you know, just watch it. Not even I'm sure I can describe some of the stuff that happens. I still don't get the thing where the boy's mom is talking to herself in the bath before she wordlessly lays naked with a bewildered Jeffrey Wright. I'm into it, but I'm not sure I understand it. Vern calls it "Alaska gothic," and I think that's the perfect name for this kind of thing.
It's on Netflix. I highly recommend it.
Early in the movie Wright is gifted Skarsgard's boots, and later, when the two meet, Skarsgard says to him, "Are those my boots?" And it made me laugh. Possibly waaaaaaaay too much.
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