In the 19th century, novelists built plots around character and social interaction -- a conventional novel showed men and women demonstrating character traits against the backdrop of a well-defined social milieu. Characters in literature had children and parents, siblings, friends, associates, bosses, servants, and enemies. Actions were embedded in society and represented alternative approaches to dealing with roles assigned by that society. Around 1900, some novels, although ostensibly realistic, featured set-pieces, that is, episodes that stood just a little to the side of social norms and that were intended to symbolize or dramatize otherwise abstract issues and, also, provide a modicum of excitement and, even, commercially viable, thrills. These novels are precursors to the movies. The greatest book that is a precursor to the early movies is Frank Norris' The Octopus -- in that novel, Norris devises shoot-outs and train chases as well as a climactic banquet intercut with poor people starving on the street to illustrate the philosophical and historical propositions that his book advances. The plot becomes a framework from which to suspend picturesque confrontations, elaborate depictions of parties and social events (the "rabbit drive" and Annixter's barn-raising party), and scenes of violence. The plot is still primary and the dramatic incidents illustrating the narrative remain secondary. But, as time, advances, films, in particular, seem to develop in the direction of preferring the bravura set-piece episodes to the narrative itself. Apocalypse Now is an excellent example -- there is a plot and, by recent standards, it is reasonably well-developed but what people recall about the movie is elaborate visual arias: the helicopter attack or the bridge under attack illumined with psychedelic Christmas tree lights. Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark (Netflix 2018) is an example of a film that is, in effect, post-narrative. There seems to be a plot, but, in fact, upon any kind of logical analysis, there is no story at all -- there are situations, highly choreographed episodes of ultra-violence, stunning landscapes, and an overall atmosphere of utter despair, but no narrative emerges from anything. Indeed, the film is resolutely anti-narrative -- it doesn't provide any motivations sufficient for the carnage that we display. In Hold the Dark, we get all the mayhem and violence but without any backstory that would make what we see meaningful. I have no idea what this impressive, but ultimately futile, film is supposed to be about.
In one typically enigmatic sequence, a grieving mother, driven to distraction because wolves have seized her child, tells the protagonist, Ronald Kor (Jeremy Wright) that "the sky is strange." At the end of the movie, after about sixty homicides, the same woman stands over the severely wounded Kor and says: "Do you see what I meant when I said the 'the sky is strange'?" Is this some sort of taunt? Obviously, the bloodied Kor has no idea what she means and neither does the viewer. "The sky is strange" -- how? in what respect? why? is this a fantasy or some kind of meteorological observation or a metaphor that we can't decipher? The film doesn't explicate and we don't know. And this is characteristic of the whole enterprise.
Kor is a wolf researcher who seems to have written a book about spending time with a wolf pack. (We don't know anything about the book except that it exists -- the grieving mother asserts that Kor killed a wolf once. But we know nothing about this either.) Medora Sloane, the mother of the missing child, scribbles a letter to the writer, a civilized, unassuming man, asking him to come to Keelut, a tiny Alaskan town where three children have been seized (supposedly) by wolves. Kor is estranged from his daughter (why?) and she works in Anchorage (why?). He decides to visit her and this becomes, it seems, his rationale for going to Keelut. Later in the film, there is some gibberish about Kor being required as a "witness" -- but the film doesn't establish what Kor is supposed to be "witnessing" or why it is important to have someone see the horrors that he beholds. And, if a witness is needed, how come the villagers so assiduously work to eliminate all others who could attest to their bizarre behavior.
Keelut is in the back of the beyond, a sinister assemblage of shacks in the middle of a huge forest over which great snow-capped mountains loom. (It's actually the Canadian Rockies around Banff). Most of the people seem to be Native-Americans and, possibly, witches or shape-shifters, "skin-walkers." In the town, everyone speaks in portentous whispers and most of what they say is totally enigmatic -- like malevolent fortunes in a Chinese fortune cookie. Just as we are getting used to the bad vibes in Keelut, Saulnier cuts away to some more horrific stuff: people being blown apart and burned to death in Fallujah where Vernon Sloane, Medora's husband, is blithely killing folks with a huge, high caliber machine-gun mounted on a tank or hum-vee. There's a totally gratuitous rape scene in which Vernon knifes another soldier, possibly a GI although we don't know for sure, and, then, helpfully leaves the blade with the victim so she can torture the disabled bad guy. It turns out that the little boy missing in Keelut is in the basement, apparently strangled by his completely depressed mother. (She greets Kor, her alleged savior, with a barrage of whispered insults, then, takes a bath muttering various bizarre and unsettling incantations -- wearing a Yupik mask, she then comes naked (except for the wooden mask) to bed and hops in with Kor, a fellow who seems so terminally morose that this just adds to his despair.) Vernon Sloane, badly wounded in Fallujah (Saulnier likes neck wounds that rhythmically spurt black blood) returns to Alaska. For some reason, he starts murdering everyone. He kills a couple cops and the coroner and steals his son's corpse which he hides in a small wooden box buried in a snow bank. One of the guys that he shoots in the face is killed, apparently, because he speculated that Medora has been suffering from "post-partum that can go on for years." In this film, if you try to figure out an explanation for what is happening, someone is liable to reward you with a bullet in the mouth. The cops hunt for Sloane. They go to Keelut where one of Sloane's buddies, an Indian named something like Cheeon, unveils a huge machine gun, similar to the weapon used by Sloane in Fallujah, and shoots to pieces about a dozen cops. The machine gun battle which is completely unmotivated goes on for about ten minutes -- it's very loud and bloody. Sloane goes to an abandoned mine where he gratuitously kills another man, then, locates an old friend to remove some buckshot in his shoulder -- an old lady at the mine wearing pop-bottle bottom glasses has shot him. After the buckshot is removed, Sloane rewards his buddy by donning a Yupik wooden mask of a wolf and killing that man. With the sheriff, poor Kor flies to a remote canyon where there is a hot spring in a cave. ("You can get really clean there," Medora has told him.) Vernon Sloane is lurking around in his wolf mask and he systematically hunts down the sheriff and Kor. Kor gets badly wounded but is left alive to witness the encounter between Vernon and his wife, the murderous Medora. Medora yanks off Sloane's homicide face, the wolf mask, and they apparently reconcile. Kor crawls through the snow while, in the penultimate scene, we see Medora and Vernon tramping through the snow pulling the little boy's pine casket behind them. Kor's daughter sees him in the hospital and, on this note, the film ends.
Simply put, there is no motivation for anything that we see in the movie. We have no idea why Medora killed her son. We can make various surmises but none of them are confirmed by the film's anti-narrative. (Did she want to get Vernon back from the war by the expedient of making his little boy vanish? Who knows?) There is absolutely no justification for Vernon's killing spree other than the fact that he is wearing a wolf-mask. No explanation is given for the showy machine gun battle with the dozen casualties in Keeluk. At one point, wolves are seen tearing apart a cub -- they are "savaging" the cub because resources are scarce. But what this has to do with the rest of the plot (or anti-plot) is unclear. Where are Vernon and Medora going at the end of the film? Why are they dragging the casket behind them? Is the white-haired Indian woman who cares for the wounded Kor at the film's ending a wolf? If so, why? Are other characters supposed to be wolves? Why is Kor estranged from his daughter? At one point, a sinister-looking Native witch woman notes that Keelut has been cursed from the start -- the "influenza" killed many of the people living there 70 years earlier and the corpses were put in "snow igloos", but wolves came and tore the corpses apart so that "there was nothing to bury." But what is this story supposed to mean? It's all darkness, doom and gloom, but we have no idea why people are doing the gruesome things we see. In a laudatory article in Film Comment, the reviewer praises the film's relentlessly depressive tone. But the reviewer entirely ignores whole sequences in the movie, apparently unable to figure them out -- for instance, the utterly pointless sequence where Vernon goes to an abandoned mine, confronts the spectral people there, and kills one of them. What is that sequence supposed to mean? The reviewer praises the machine gun fight as state-of-the-art violence, but he doesn't explain what the movie is supposed to be about or, even, if it is about anything at all. Saulnier is certainly immensely talented when it comes to violence and creating an atmosphere of lurking horror (although he borrows from other filmmakers -- some of the scenes of Kor coming to Keelut are cribbed from Kubrick's The Shining minus the "Dies Irae" music which wouldn't be out of place in this venture). But he's too lazy to figure out what the spectacular set-pieces that he orchestrates are supposed to mean. The film isn't only baffling, it's meanings are intentionally obfuscated -- but to what effect? Why?
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