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Hold the Dark (2018) N
A young woman contacts a writer and wolf expert Russell Core. Her six-year-old was taken by a wolf and she wants Core to kill the animal. He finds the pack but he also finds something else. When boy's father returns from Iraq things start to get really twisted.
Hold the Dark has all the ingredients to be a marvelous movie but it in the end it fails on the (for me at least) most important matter, telling a story. It starts slow and reaches a sort of climax in the middle but the answers I was waiting for never came. Actions of the characters seem incoherent and it's very difficult to get involved when you don't understand why anything happens. Maybe that was the point but for me it just doesn't work.
There's lots of good in the film too. Cinematography is mostly good and the settings are truly beautiful. There's a bleak and foreboding atmosphere that's amplified by outstanding soundtrack. There are events that I couldn't predict and they would have been great if only I had understood them after the film. Acting is also very good.
This is pretty much an example of a film where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It's definitely not bad though and not even that far from being good. If only it would have made little more sense afterwards.
A young woman contacts a writer and wolf expert Russell Core. Her six-year-old was taken by a wolf and she wants Core to kill the animal. He finds the pack but he also finds something else. When boy's father returns from Iraq things start to get really twisted.
Hold the Dark has all the ingredients to be a marvelous movie but it in the end it fails on the (for me at least) most important matter, telling a story. It starts slow and reaches a sort of climax in the middle but the answers I was waiting for never came. Actions of the characters seem incoherent and it's very difficult to get involved when you don't understand why anything happens. Maybe that was the point but for me it just doesn't work.
There's lots of good in the film too. Cinematography is mostly good and the settings are truly beautiful. There's a bleak and foreboding atmosphere that's amplified by outstanding soundtrack. There are events that I couldn't predict and they would have been great if only I had understood them after the film. Acting is also very good.
This is pretty much an example of a film where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It's definitely not bad though and not even that far from being good. If only it would have made little more sense afterwards.