Hot, Crazy Mess

I cut the chord, children. I spent an hour on the phone with Xfinity where an agent offered me discounts, bribes, and her first born if I would just keep my cable X1 box. As convenient as it was, I need to try something new. Everyone I know that gets things done and actually publish — they don’t have cable. I’m going to try and walk the same path, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have everything else because being an addict doesn’t go away overnight.

Back to the Netflix film. Hold the Dark stars Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgard, and Riley Keough. I started this movie not knowing anything about it. I was thinking maybe it was The Grey meets 30 Days of Night. It wasn’t. It was more of a crime drama that examined human behavior in the Alaskan wilderness.

The film opens with Medora Slone (played by Keough) watching her son play outside. It then moves to a voiceover where we hear her read out loud a letter that she’s written to Russell Core (played by Wright) asking him to help her find her son’s body, as he has been taken by wolves. Core wrote a novel on the life and habits of wolves in that region of Alaska and she wants help in retrieving her son’s body before her husband, Vernon (played by Skarsgard) returns from his tour in the Middle East.

Core agrees to help, only because he has a daughter in Alaska that he is estranged from and wants to reconnect. Medora is an almost ethereal character that doesn’t exist in a regular world setting. There’s a thick feeling in the air that Core should never have agreed to come to this town.

We meet Vernon somewhere in the Middle East and the five minutes we spend with him in the desert tells us everything we need to know about him. He’s methodical and doles out swift justice where he believes it’s due. By the time he touches down in Alaska, you’re scared for the person that has to tell him that his son has died.

This is where the story gets a bit murky. It’s assumed that Medora has killed her son and Vernon plans to go after her. There’s a ceremony where Vernon buries his son and actually cuts his forearm open to draw symbols on his son’s casket. At this point in the film I still believed we were headed down a supernatural path.

I can spoil entire seasons of shows for people, but I try to be more considerate of films. Watch this film. Especially since I want other’s opinion on what was happening and if you saw the grey area as truly grey area.

I can tell you that after watching HBO for twenty years and reading VC Andrews as a tween that nothing shocks me and I guess the reveal most of the time. It’s a sore thumb in this film, but even with the revelation, I’m left asking, “so what now?”

I’ve never lived anywhere as desolate as this small town in Alaska. Left to your own devices, do you really go batshit crazy? Is the quiet and the lack of stimuli enough for you to break? I can’t answer that. I can understand why certain individuals made the decisions that they did, but the speed at which these decisions were executed is what had me leaving cover and risking it all by raising my hand with questions.

Skarsgard’s body of work in the past ten years is admirable. Since True Blood, he has chosen smaller, character-driven projects. His at times distracting beauty doesn’t take away from the work he put into film, but it did have me asking if I accepted his path more because of it. From Straw Dogs to Big Little Lies, he plays these characters that are not what they appear to be on the surface. So much so that as soon as I see him in a film, I will assume that the character I meet at the beginning will not be who he turns out to be in the end.

Hold the Dark explores what humans are capable of, but I don’t believe any of the life choices or outcomes will be surprising to anyone.