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Film Name: Hold The Dark
Release Date: September 28, 2018
Platform: Netflix
Hold The Dark Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Riley Keough, Alexander Skarsgard
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
The Pitch: When a child disappears into the northern Alaskan wilderness, a retired naturalist and wolf expert is summoned to figure out what happened. While the expert and the boy’s young mother explore the wilderness, the boy’s father embarks on his own journey of discovery, but his behavior quickly threatens to expose them all to violence.
Why We’re Excited: Hold The Dark is a man versus nature story far more explicit than other films in the genre. The film focuses on the conflict between the humans living in the small Alaskan town and the wolves that are killing them; it is, quite literally, an eat or be eaten situation. But the wolves aren’t the town’s only enemy: there’s also some sort of weird, mask-wearing presence in the town (it kind of seems like a cult) that’s ready to incite violence. Maybe these mask-wearing vigilantes — of which the boy’s father (Skarsgard) seems to be a part — are hunting wolves, maybe they’re hunting people, or maybe they just enjoy playing with bloody arrows, but regardless, it’s clear that something shady is going on out in the woods.
Hold The Dark gives Jeffrey Wright an opportunity to play a character very different from Bernard on Westworld. Instead of playing the introverted nerd-type, Wright plays a hardscrabble outdoorsman who sets out to hunt the murderous wolves. Core is at one with nature (or as one with blood-thirsty wolves as you can be), but he has less luck with the townspeople — he’s seen as an outsider, and he has a hard time getting anyone other than the boy’s mother (Keough) to trust him. As such, Hold The Dark becomes more than just a classic man versus nature story: it’s part fish-out-of-water tale, part psychological thriller, and part survival epic.
Jeremy Saulnier’s last film was the indie horror hit Green Room, so expectations are high going into Hold The Dark. However, with star-power coming from Wright, Skarsgard, and Keough, it seems like Saulnier will have no problem capturing the public’s attention once again.
