Hold the Dark

I was looking forward to the new Wind River, but it turned out to be a disappointment. I'm probably not intellectually sophisticated enough, as I didn't really get what the film was about. It was like an abstract poem by a well-known poet, which we were supposed to analyze at school and find out what the author had meant. Just like back then, I eventually realized I didn’t really care. The only memorable moment for me was the excellently filmed fight against the machine gun nest, but the rest of the film felt like a blur of often unrelated situations and the ending went totally over my head. (29/10/2018)

It's a shame such a pure and beautifully crafted raw survival drama has such a mind-fuck of a nothing much to say, wannabe mystery screenplay. The main plot line is lacking, but all the other features (set design, atmosphere, action sequences) are excellent. There's been a bit too much of Wind River lately, but it's still an enthralling thing. (17/10/2018)

The ending doesn’t exactly make perfect sense in the context of the characters’ previous motivations, but after all the dark, rationally incomprehensible lupine occultism of the Alaskan wilderness, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the course of the relatively long, roughly drawn story is continuously exciting and captivatingly atmospheric with constant surprising plot twists. I was drawn into it, just like in the case of Wind River, in which, however, everything had a logical place and the plot was precisely taken to a more coherent and thoughtful ending. (20/01/2019)

An atmospheric thriller that excels with excellent action scenes and a slightly demonic Alexander Skarsgård. Comparisons to Wind River may be fitting in terms of the locations chosen and the murder mystery plot, but otherwise Hold the Dark forges its own path and is more of a meditative thriller with mystery elements than a murder mystery. The plot is told very slowly, but there are some really intense passages and the whole narrative is interestingly framed with metaphors. It's just a pity that the final impression was a bit weaker than I initially expected. (16/10/2018)

Over the time, I’m discovering that Netflix doesn’t mean only good movies. Sometimes it also means average movies and sometimes even bad ones. However, Hold the Dark fortunately belongs among the better part of Netflix production. It has a solid atmosphere, and if it didn’t last more than two hours, the audience wouldn’t have the time to be bored. But as it is, there are moments when the characters act like retards or worse. In the second half of the film, it however gains some pleasant momentum and the ending is nice. The action finale makes it into better average; without it, I might have thought that someone was trying to make a rip-off of Wind River. When watching this film, I didn’t know yet that ‘rip-off’ is Netflix’s favorite word. (13/04/2020)