'Hold the Dark' Is the Most Brutal Movie on Netflix
Off the heels of his success with 'Green Room,' Jeremy Saulnier's first big-budget film is a sensible departure from his past work.
Jeremy Saulnier is no stranger to violence. The director made real headway with his 2015 film, Green Room, which features a neo-Nazi Patrick Stewart trying to kill a punk rock band that witnessed a murder in his Pacific Northwest club. But he had really cemented himself in blood—in the action-thriller genre—years before, with Blue Ruin (2013), a crowd-funded, family revenge tale, and Murder Party (2007), a comedy-horror hybrid about hip sadistic art students. (He was supposed to be one of the directors for the forthcoming season of True Detective, but departed the show after two episodes.) Though Saulnier's newest project, Hold the Dark, a Netflix original that recently premiered on the streaming platform, perhaps includes more gore than any of his previous attempts (it definitely has a higher body count), it's still something of a departure for him. Or, in the very least, a notable evolution: a sweeping, expansive work of art set, it seems, at the end of the world.
Here, Jeffrey Wright, one of the stars of that robot show everyone stopped watching, plays Russell Core, a writer and naturalist who travels to the small village of Keelut, Alaska, at the request of a woman named Medora Sloane (Riley Keough). Wolves, she writes to him, have been ripping children from their homes, and she believes her son to be the most recent victim. Since he's covered the beast before, can Core help her find her kid? Medora's husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), meanwhile, is busy shooting a gun in Fallujah, and, in the only scene not in the winter-clad wilderness, we see his nihilistic tendencies without any misunderstanding: We know he's going to return home from the war, and we know he's not the type of man who'll let the kidnapper of his kin off the hook, whoever that may turn out to be. What transpires is a nearly biblical tale—of man against nature, light against dark—and, really, that's about all left to say. To explain more—to try to explain more—would ruin the story's mythic power.
Saulnier's a visually arresting artist, and he certainly didn't make it easy on himself this time around. He adapted Hold the Dark from a sparse book, a literary novel by the writer and critic William Giraldi, an instructor at Boston University and an editor at the journal AGNI, who's as protective and fierce about language as anyone in existence. (Here's Giraldi's view on the internet in a line: "I just can't fathom wasting a solitary minute on Twitter or Facebook," he said to the Huffington Post in 2015, "when Paradise Lost is waiting here.")
Off the heels of his success with 'Green Room,' Jeremy Saulnier's first big-budget film is a sensible departure from his past work.
Jeremy Saulnier is no stranger to violence. The director made real headway with his 2015 film, Green Room, which features a neo-Nazi Patrick Stewart trying to kill a punk rock band that witnessed a murder in his Pacific Northwest club. But he had really cemented himself in blood—in the action-thriller genre—years before, with Blue Ruin (2013), a crowd-funded, family revenge tale, and Murder Party (2007), a comedy-horror hybrid about hip sadistic art students. (He was supposed to be one of the directors for the forthcoming season of True Detective, but departed the show after two episodes.) Though Saulnier's newest project, Hold the Dark, a Netflix original that recently premiered on the streaming platform, perhaps includes more gore than any of his previous attempts (it definitely has a higher body count), it's still something of a departure for him. Or, in the very least, a notable evolution: a sweeping, expansive work of art set, it seems, at the end of the world.
Here, Jeffrey Wright, one of the stars of that robot show everyone stopped watching, plays Russell Core, a writer and naturalist who travels to the small village of Keelut, Alaska, at the request of a woman named Medora Sloane (Riley Keough). Wolves, she writes to him, have been ripping children from their homes, and she believes her son to be the most recent victim. Since he's covered the beast before, can Core help her find her kid? Medora's husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), meanwhile, is busy shooting a gun in Fallujah, and, in the only scene not in the winter-clad wilderness, we see his nihilistic tendencies without any misunderstanding: We know he's going to return home from the war, and we know he's not the type of man who'll let the kidnapper of his kin off the hook, whoever that may turn out to be. What transpires is a nearly biblical tale—of man against nature, light against dark—and, really, that's about all left to say. To explain more—to try to explain more—would ruin the story's mythic power.
Saulnier's a visually arresting artist, and he certainly didn't make it easy on himself this time around. He adapted Hold the Dark from a sparse book, a literary novel by the writer and critic William Giraldi, an instructor at Boston University and an editor at the journal AGNI, who's as protective and fierce about language as anyone in existence. (Here's Giraldi's view on the internet in a line: "I just can't fathom wasting a solitary minute on Twitter or Facebook," he said to the Huffington Post in 2015, "when Paradise Lost is waiting here.")
