There are certain attractive and intriguing elements at play here. A bleak, isolated, poverty-stricken community beyond the fringes of civilisation, surrounded by snowy mountains, forests and packs of wolves. Missing children and grieving parents. A psychologically damaged naturalist, writer and wolf expert. A dogged local sheriff. A veteran of the Iraq conflict who is a stone-cold killer of men. His wife who appears to have murdered their son and blamed it on the animals. Native American mythology surrounding wolves and spirits and stuff.
Cinematography is good, perfectly capturing and visually depicting a harsh and barren world teetering on the brink of implosion. The atmosphere of doom and foreboding, of barely glimpsed danger on the periphery of vision, is communicated effectively. All in all, a promising set-up. Attractive and intriguing elements at play.
It unravels quickly into an incoherent mess, lacking any clarity or indication of what might be going on or why. There are hints of supernatural forces in the story, of shared or inherited psychosis, but the characters and their motivation are never discernible through a chilly morass of mumbled and whispered cryptic dialogue and impenetrable expressionless stares into the void. At time it is slow and ponderous, which wouldn't automatically be such a bad thing, providing the slow burn and the pondering signposted something meaningful, revealed something that triggers understanding. It doesn't.
Over half way in there is an action-packed and well-choreographed sequence of mass slaughter, wherein a disaffected and implicated villager unloads on the local police force with a belt-fed machine gun. Why is never really explained. Frustration, boredom, revenge for something, who knows? And am I wrong in thinking that armed police should possess some meagre proficiency with firearms and been trained to use them? Ten or fifteen coppers fail to hit a static man-sized target a few metres away who never changes position. That aside, it's a thrilling ten minutes of mayhem that does liven things up, but nevertheless feels a bit misplaced.
Perhaps the underpinning concept was to make a movie that was deliberately inexplicable, that old chestnut of leaving it up to the viewer to reach their own conclusions as to what was going on or why and what it all means in the end. Ambiguity, hints, clues and cues can work well when utilised by skilled craftsmen - Kubrick's "The Shining," for instance springs to mind. It can be entertaining and fun. But the bulk of this offering is murky, indistinct and fatally flawed in a narrative sense. And in the end frustrates and alienates.
Maybe the makers will one day provide some pointers on the subject, to help out middling dullards like me. I don't know about Hold The Dark, I'm certainly In The Dark this time around.
Cinematography is good, perfectly capturing and visually depicting a harsh and barren world teetering on the brink of implosion. The atmosphere of doom and foreboding, of barely glimpsed danger on the periphery of vision, is communicated effectively. All in all, a promising set-up. Attractive and intriguing elements at play.
It unravels quickly into an incoherent mess, lacking any clarity or indication of what might be going on or why. There are hints of supernatural forces in the story, of shared or inherited psychosis, but the characters and their motivation are never discernible through a chilly morass of mumbled and whispered cryptic dialogue and impenetrable expressionless stares into the void. At time it is slow and ponderous, which wouldn't automatically be such a bad thing, providing the slow burn and the pondering signposted something meaningful, revealed something that triggers understanding. It doesn't.
Over half way in there is an action-packed and well-choreographed sequence of mass slaughter, wherein a disaffected and implicated villager unloads on the local police force with a belt-fed machine gun. Why is never really explained. Frustration, boredom, revenge for something, who knows? And am I wrong in thinking that armed police should possess some meagre proficiency with firearms and been trained to use them? Ten or fifteen coppers fail to hit a static man-sized target a few metres away who never changes position. That aside, it's a thrilling ten minutes of mayhem that does liven things up, but nevertheless feels a bit misplaced.
Perhaps the underpinning concept was to make a movie that was deliberately inexplicable, that old chestnut of leaving it up to the viewer to reach their own conclusions as to what was going on or why and what it all means in the end. Ambiguity, hints, clues and cues can work well when utilised by skilled craftsmen - Kubrick's "The Shining," for instance springs to mind. It can be entertaining and fun. But the bulk of this offering is murky, indistinct and fatally flawed in a narrative sense. And in the end frustrates and alienates.
Maybe the makers will one day provide some pointers on the subject, to help out middling dullards like me. I don't know about Hold The Dark, I'm certainly In The Dark this time around.