10/2/18 - Hold the Dark (2018) - 6+/10

Nighlistically bleak and humanistically desolate. This is a creeping maw of devastation and cold darkness that slowly gnaws, grinding away at hope and happiness. It stares at the blackness inside the pitted souls of its subjects, failing to explain but letting that darkness lash out and consume. Like his previous work, it cares not about playing nice, but takes us to a resolute understanding that endings are inevitable and horror happens. As opposed to subsuming it in a green wave of bone crunching punk ambiance or a blue desolation of loss and sawed off revenge, Saulnier uses the penitent cold and animalistic inhumanity to quell the heat of amity and starve the hunger of logic & optimism. Nothing in the dark will save you and it is finding the truth that you bring to the wilderness of depraved humanity that must serve as its own reward in the barest of crippling survival.

 The tinge of weird and seemingly spooky haunts the edges of a nearly ineffable human monstrosity. It only adds to the unsteadiness and indescribable possibility of human interactions, be they gentle life affirming brushes of love or the frigid malevolence of man’s most brutal possibilities. This film lets its desires and aims heave their breath into a fine wintry mist, hovering, lingering, and nagging. Slowly and purposefully, Saulnier and his cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck share an indomitable passion and scathing harshness in the beautiful frames they paint and quizzically dulled emotional ghosts they let inhabit those spaces not spoken. Laid bare in the snow and deathly potent, Hold the Dark is a satisfying in its austerity and solemnity; valuing the core essences of life, death, the wild, and way of the world. It is the darkness internalized and externalized that bleeds through so well.