Hold the Dark, based on the book by William Giraldi - Seven out of 10

Hold the Dark, based on the book by William Giraldi

Seven out of 10

Hold the Dark does not exactly fail to deliver the drama, mystery excepted of a film of this genre, but it does not render memorable scenes.

There are unexpected moments, the setting is also if not unseen or unheard of, at least somewhat rare and the mixture of Alaskan wilderness, primitive, obscure superstitions, Iraqi fighting and trauma, wolves and a scientist who studies their behavior is original, if not altogether unheard of.

There have been some recent revelations which purport that the now classic tale of the “Alpha male „is false and the original researcher who proposed the term has in the meantime distanced himself from it.

In hold the Dark, we have some surprises, one of which is not on the scale of the refutation  of the “Alpha male „myth but still a disturbing assessment, like the statement that wolves would kill one of their own, if food is unavailable and they face starvation.

Medora Slone is the mother who writes a letter pretending that wolves had taken her child and she addresses it to Russell Core aka the excellent Jeffrey Wright – very present these days on CNN, BBC as the hero of a commercial for Dell.

The grieving mother lives in the northern part of Alaska, in a small village which has its own witch, and she wants Russell Core, who is a scientist researching wolves and their behavior, to find the animal responsible for snatching her son and killing it.

When the two meet, the woman has a very outré attitude, she takes a bath while the guest is trying to sleep, and he sees her in the tub, she stands up, comes to his bed and enters it, naked, taking his hand and apparently trying to suffocate herself with it!

Meanwhile, her husband, Vernon Slone aka the actor who may now specialize in roles of evil men Alexander Skarsgard, is fighting in Iraq, where he shoots up a vehicle that seems to have endangered the American troops and when it finally blows up in flames, a man tries to escape, while he is burning and the heartless enemy is killing him without hesitation.

That must be an indication of the profile, the vicious fiber of Vernon Slone, who will soon take up the role of the villain of this strange, rather bizarre narrative, that will make the sagas of Iraq and Alaska intersect.

Later on, Russell Core is walking about in a city – the previous scene took place in the wilderness, an open space where it made no sense to kill the opponents with such cruelty – when he sees through a window a man in uniform having sex with a civilian woman.

For yours truly it was unclear if the man was American – those who are familiar with the uniforms may now, indeed, even someone attentive enough to see that the protagonist and the stranger wear the same outfit – but the fact is that the continuation is gruesome.

Our villain takes a knife out and stabs the presumed rapist multiple times and at the end, he offers the weapon to the woman that seems to finish her attacker after she is left alone with him.

This may have been an attempt to bring justice and some people may applaud this act, but it was brutal, committed according to the letter, perhaps also the spirit of the Old Testament when a court martial should have been the path to take.

Russell Core returns home to find that his wife is missing and in her absence, Russell Core has found the body of the child that the mother had falsely claimed to have been snatched by wolves.

In order to take vengeance into his own hands, the retuning service man – wounded as he walked out of the ghastly punishment of a supposed rape – kills police officers in a macabre action that is the final confirmation – if one was still needed – of the mental disorder and the horror that is still to come.

To make matters worse, there is another deranged individual in the same small village, one that has some scores to settle with the law and those who defend it, Cheeon, seemingly a Native American who would kill more people than even the master villain, although the latter has been to the Middle East, where we cannot know for sure the number of casualties he had caused.

In the scene where the horror reaches a climax, Cheeon mounts a heavy machine gun in an attic and kills – after causing terrible pain in most cases – almost all the law enforcement agents that come to his neighborhood.

When compared with the wolves, the actions of Medora and Vernon Slone and Cheeon appear so much more repugnant and monstrous, even if in one dialogue, the scientist tries to explain what the wolves do as a last resort:

“They kill their own, take the weakest down

We are not dealing with animals”

The response was correct in some ways, but the calamity brought about by humans – not animals in the view of the local police officer – is much worse, senseless, tragic, and almost epic in scale.

Hold the Dark has some interesting moments, but not enough to make it a landmark or even a worthwhile motion picture ultimately.