She writes to Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), a celebrated author with a professed expertise on the animals, asking for his help. Medora Sloane (played by Riley Keough) is a mother living in a small Alaskan town who lost her son to a pack of wolves. Set in the frozen expanses of Alaska, it’s loaded with gorgeous, frightening imagery of a country at its wildest, but there isn’t enough sensible plotting to ground the film in reality.īased on William Giraldi’s 2014 novel (and written by Saulnier’s frequent collaborator Macon Blair), Hold the Dark is another ostensible story of revenge and death, at least at first. Hold the Dark is something different, a tale with a sense of grandeur and mythic scale. Blue Ruin is a simple revenge narrative, in which a long-standing grudge erupts into a new cycle of killing, while Green Room follows a pitched struggle between a punk band and a group of neo-Nazis after a concert.
Saulnier, who directed the wonderfully nightmarish thrillers Blue Ruin and Green Room, has a vision of America that can be starkly brutal. The film cuts from this carnage to two of its participants drinking wine and collecting themselves afterward, chatting as if they just had a tough day at the office. It’s the kind of showdown that would provoke instant national attention in real life, but in the world of the director Jeremy Saulnier, it’s just another day in America. What starts out as a siege turns into a spectacle, with automatic weapons blazing, cars exploding, and blood flying in every direction. Midway through Hold the Dark, a gun battle breaks out between a disgruntled resident of a rural Alaskan settlement and the local police.