Movie Review: Hold the Dark

Hold the Dark **** / *****

Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier.

Written by: Macon Blair based on the book by William Giraldi.

Starring: Jeffrey Wright (Russell Core), Alexander Skarsgård (Vernon Sloane), Riley Keough (Medora Slone), James Badge Dale (Donald Marium), Macon Blair (Shan), Julian Black Antelope (Cheeon), Beckam Crawford (Bailey).

 

Jeremy Saulnier’s last two films – Blue Ruin and Green Room – are about normal people who are forced into violent situations, get in over their heads, and then have to fight back in a way they didn’t think they were capable of. The same could be said about his latest film, Hold the Dark, as well – and yet, this doesn’t feel like Saulnier is going over the same ground once again. Hold the Dark is more ambitious and ambiguous – and, true, less satisfying – than his previous two films, mainly because Saulnier refuses to give the audience the payoff they expect. Hell, he hardly even gives them the setup. This a slower moving, more internal film, where ultimately, not everything can be explained. Some crimes – some people – are like that.

 

The film takes place almost entirely in Alaska – in a small town up North (when one character says they have a daughter in Anchorage, the person they’re talking to sneers “That city ain’t Alaska” – and you know what they mean). This town has had a wolf problem recently – with three local children being taken off into the woods by the animals. The mother of the most recent victim, Medora Slone (Riley Keough), writes a letter to Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), an expert on wolves to get him to come and see if he can track the animals that took her boy. She knows her son is dead, but wants this taken care of before her husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard), returns from the war overseas. Core agrees, but quickly realizes he has no idea what he has agreed to – no idea what is going on in this town. Meanwhile, Medora has run off, and Vernon – after we witness him kill a lot people in the war – shows back up, to kill a lot of people in Alaska, as he tries to track down his wife. Core, and the Sheriff (James Badge Dale) are on the trail of them both.

 

Hold the Dark is an odd film, as it is all about its dark tone in which nothing in this town feels quite right. Yes, three children have gone missing – probably killed by wolves, but there is something about this town, how they look at Core, how they interact with each other which suggests there is something even darker at play here. This is the type of film where you’re never quite sure what to expect next – whether something otherworldly is going to happen, or something just deep down human is wrong here.

 

Core is an odd choice as a protagonist, because he’s more of an observer than anything – our conduit into this world that is clearly deeply messed up, but someone the people inside of it don’t seem to realize that. Wright is a terrific actor – and this is one of his best performances – it is an interior performance, one about pain and torment and confusion. He doesn’t really drive the story forward in any way though – and neither, really does Medora, who is gone after she sets everything in motion. The driving force is Vernon, but he’s probably the most unknowable of all of the characters. He certainly speaks the least – especially after he goes off on his own.

 

The movie occasionally burst into brutal violence – nowhere more so than at about the half way point, where there is a sustained gun battle between the police, and one man with a high powered rifle, that keeps going and going and going, from one brutal, bloody minute to the next. That scene may just act as the entire film as a microcosm – as Core watches in horror, unable to really do anything, and not even to be able to explain what’s happening in why. He’ll eventually break and just yell “Stop:” – probably because there is nothing else he could say.

 

Hold the Dark isn’t as viscerally satisfying as Blue Ruin or Green Room. It isn’t as satisfying on a dramatic level either, really, because the characters in those earlier films were easy to understand and relate to – even the bad guys, you knew why they were who they were. Here, everything is a mystery. Perhaps it’s a little too much, and perhaps the film is a little too long at just over two hours. But it’s a deeper, dark, ambitious and ambiguous film – perhaps one that will grow on multiple viewings. It is proof that Saulnier is a great filmmaker – the film is visually stunning from beginning to end. It may not be quite up to the standards of those other two films, but it perhaps shows a slightly different direction in which he’s heading.

Movie Review: Green Room

Green Room

Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier.

Written by: Jeremy Saulnier.

Starring: Anton Yelchin (Pat), Patrick Stewart (Darcy), Joe Cole (Reece), Alia Shawkat (Sam), Callum Turner (Tiger), Imogen Poots (Amber), David W. Thompson (Tad), Mark Webber (Daniel), Macon Blair (Gabe), Eric Edelstein (Big Justin), Brent Werzner (Werm), Taylor Tunes (Emily), Kai Lennox (Clark), Samuel Summer (Jonathan), Mason Knight (Kyle), Colton Ruscheinsky (Alan).

 

Blue Ruin announced Jeremy Saulnier as a major new talent in American genre filmmaking – and his follow-up Green Room confirms it. Both films are among the bloodiest you will see, and yet neither film really dwells on the blood that is spilled. The violence, when it comes, is usually over fairly quickly – but leaves that mess behind for the characters to deal with. Although everyone in the films have a plan – nothing really goes exactly how they think it will. Things go wrong, mistakes are made, there are unintended and unforeseen consequences that the characters do not see coming. Both films also play with their genre, subtly twisting things without jabbing you in the chest, and pointing out how clever the movie is. Blue Ruin is a film that has grown in my mind since I saw it at TIFF in 2013 – and something similar is happening with Green Room in the days since I saw it. Both films work – amazingly well – as genre film exercises – but both films have more going on than it appears like on the surface.

 

In short, Green Room is about a punk band named The Ain’t Rights, on a small, cross country tour from their home in Washington D.C. – now all the way in Portland, Oregon. They’re on their last stop, and yet, they still have no money (they have everything they need to siphon gas to get from gig-to-gig). We’re introduced to them as they are being interviews for a small radio piece – about why they value the live experience over albums, and why they have no social media presence. In these early scenes, it’s hard what to make of the band – are they a group of pretentious, untalented, punks and criminals – or do you admire them for the purity of their vision (or, perhaps, both). The band needs money, and after a gig is cancelled, they end up at another one instead. They are warned that the crowd will be “right wing, well, actually ultra-left wing, but that’s the same thing” (aka, they’re being playing for racist skinheads) – but hey, a gig is a gig, and money is money. After deliberately antagonizing the crowd in their first song, and then, presumably, winning them back after they are ready to hit the road – when they end up walking in on something they should never have seen. Now, they’ve locked themselves in the backroom of this makeshift club, in the middle of nowhere, with a dead body, a huge skinhead, and a friend of the victim. Outside, the skinheads – led by Patrick Stewart’s Darcy, who owns the place, try and talk them out – which they are reluctant to do sensing, rightly, that if they leave they’ll be killed.

 

Green Room works wonderfully well as a surface level thriller – as Saulnier gradually ratchets up the tension from one scene to the next. The characters are stuck in an impossible situation – and yet the decisions they make actually make sense at the time they make them – even if the results of those decisions is often disastrous. The film plays with the audience brilliantly – setting up various moments that we think we know how they will pay off, and then not going the expected root. He did this in Blue Ruin as well (the best example being when Macon Blair’s character tries to perform a little surgery on himself – which goes really wrong). Here, he sets up some “hero” moments that never actually come to pass. Saulnier’s approach to violence is fascinating as well. This is as bloody a film as you will see this year – yet Saulnier spends more time on the aftermath of the violence rather than the violence itself. The violence comes fast and furious in the film, and then is over rather quickly. But Saulnier doesn’t let the audience off the hook – he makes you sit with the blood, the viscera and the bodies for quite some time afterwards. Green Room even has an undercurrent of very dark comedy – including a last line that will go as one of the best of the year.

 

But Green Room is deeper than its genre trappings initially seem to indicate. The movie taps into the rage that leads to so much violence in America. Yes, the bad guys in the movie are racist skinheads – yet they are not over-the-top with their hatred, and Saulnier and his actors certainly paint different levels of their commitment. Patrick Stewart has perhaps never been better than he is as Darcy – a man who runs the organization, but is more of a businessman than anything else. He’s tired, and just wants the mess cleaned up, so it doesn’t jeopardize his earning potential. Blue Ruin’s Macon Blair has a great role as a man who is tough to get a read on – how much he believes. Imogen Poots is excellent as well –someone who starts on one side – she is at the skinhead show willingly, but ends up aligned with the band out of necessity. Even the various members of the band show different levels of commitment to their own, perhaps outdated ideology. This isn’t a movie about character development – out of necessity, a movie set over the course of one night, in one location in an intense situation, doesn’t have room for that. But that doesn’t mean the characters are one dimensional – at all.

 

Green Room is one of the best films of the year so far – a brilliant genre exercise, with additional layers which make it fascinating to think over – and one assumes, revisit. Don’t miss this one.

Movie Review: Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin
Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier.
Written by: Jeremy Saulnier.
Starring: Macon Blair (Dwight), Devin Ratray (Ben Gaffney), Amy Hargreaves (Sam), Kevin Kolack (Teddy Cleland), Eve Plumb (Kris Cleland), David W. Thompson (William), Brent Werzner (Carl Cleland), Stacy Rock (Hope Cleland), Sidné Anderson (Officer Eddy), Bonnie Johnson (Margaret), Ydaiber Orozco (Amanda).

Stories about revenge are amongst the oldest stories in history – and movies about revenge have been around since the beginning. The reason is simple – revenge stories are simple, visceral, violent and instantly relatable. Who doesn’t at least sympathize with someone trying to get revenge on the people who wronged them? Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin is in many ways a classic revenge story – the story of a man who sets out to get vengeance on the man who killed his parents. But Saulnier subtly twists the genre – not enough that he’s twisting the genre just to be clever or for the sake of twisting it, but enough that the film keeps you guessing as to what is going to happen – and the reasons behind it.

The film starts Macon Blair, in a brilliant performance, as Dwight. When he first meet him, he seems like a homeless man – long hair, scraggily beard, dirty clothes, digging through dumpsters and sleeping in his old, beat up car. These early scenes – that are largely wordless – are among the best in the movie, and Blair’s performance is subtle, yet holds the screen. When he is told that the man who killed his parents has been paroled, he packs up his car, and drives to get his revenge. He’s there when the man is released from jail, and follows him to a bar. After a confrontation is the bathroom – that ends with the result he wanted, but still counts as a screw-up, Dwight is forced to get ready to kill even more people. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard makes Dwight look like a mild mannered accountant – and when he visits his sister, he is still barely able to get himself to talk above whisper. He knows that the family of the dead man – criminals in their own right – isn’t going to let him get away with what he did, so he prepares for more.

But Dwight does not all of a sudden become a Charles Bronson, Death Wish-type killing machine. The confrontations are often end the way he wants to, but are clumsy, bloody, messy, and end with him being hurt. And when he gets hurt, he stays hurt. One of the best sequences in the movie involves an arrow wound he gets to the leg. The movie sets it up like a typical scene – with Dwight going to the store to get everything he needs to remove the arrow, and stitch himself up himself – but ends in a much more realistic way.

That type of scene – setting it up like a normal revenge movie would, but ending in a different, more realistic way, pretty much describes the movie as a whole as well. I won’t spoil the secrets of the movie, but needless to say, things are not as simple as Dwight thought they were. In some ways, the movie is like Chan-wook Park’s revenge trilogy – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance – except instead of going over the top, and trying to screw with the audiences head, Saulnier tries to bring things back down to earth. The end result is the same though – the main character realizing that he, and everyone else, would have been much better off had they not started down the path to vengeance in the first place. This may not be an overly original message – but it’s still effective in the hands of Saulnier, and Blair.

Blue Ruin is micro budgeted filmmaking at its best. Saulnier, who has only directed one other film – the horror comedy Murder Party (unseen by me), used Kickstarter to fund the movie, and unlike some more recent projects that used the website, didn’t have a name brand to fall back on. This is stripped to the bone, raw, bloody filmmaking – expertly written and directed, and whose acting is better than most films with bigger budgets, and names. It may not be the most original film of the year – but it’s still great filmmaking.