Jeremy Saulnier’s 2016 breakthrough, “Green Room,” depicted a traveling punk band held captive by a gang of white supremacists in a remote corner of Oregon.
For his fourth and most ambitious film, “Hold the Dark,” the director returns again to sinister goings-on within secluded, rural communities, only this time the evil at hand is much more Judge Holden than David Duke.
Boasting the sort of shocking brutality and unnerving menace that has become Saulnier’s signature, “Hold the Dark” is also a strangely seductive film, and one that understands the difference between simple plot resolution and catharsis, leading us on a journey into Alaska’s frigid heart of darkness that poses more questions than it answers.“Hold the Dark” is unflinchingly violent, at times almost excessively so, and yet its starkest act of savagery occurs in the first few minutes, and is all the more haunting for its ambiguity.
In
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