Hold the Dark

The dark overwhelms in Hold the Dark (dir. Jeffrey Saulnier, 2018) .  It deepens and then deepens again, until the final and inexplicably hopeful scene. The color palette of the film is mainly black and white, and much of the film occurs at night, or in dark rooms. A woman in a remote area of Alaska whose son has been seized by a wolf summons a wolf expert, Russell Core (played by Jeffrey Wright), to kill the predator.  Her husband is returning from Afghanistan. She tells Core that three children have been taken by the wolf. He decides to help her, because she’s suffering, but tells her that he doesn’t like killing animals.  Core is a black man, yet his race plays little role in the film, other than to emphasize his otherness in a place of extremes. One strange turn follows another.  The grief-stricken mother shows up naked at his bedside, wearing a wolf mask.  An old native woman who lives nearby warns Wright that the grieving mother is evil. Wright discovers the missing child covered by a plastic sheet in her basement, where she has left him, after strangling him.  She has run away. Wright suffers one mishap after another but believing that the woman’s husband will hunt her down and kill her, he tries to find her. Nothing is what it seems.  People die, are murdered. As the film ends, Wright is in a hospital, badly wounded, overseen by his daughter, from whom he has been estranged. The small redemptive moment seems insufficient—though maybe not for Core.

One looks for some rationale for the film’s pervasive darkness.  Obviously Core is drawn into a situation he isn’t prepared for and has no hope of understanding.  But what is the point, other than the unknowable nature of human beings, their potential for depravity, murder, and love?  The intersection of different cultures is an issue, but one doesn’t know what to say about it because the film faintly hints at it.