Hold The Dark Review: 4 Ups & 3 Downs

2. The Film Tries (And Fails) To Equate Murder To Nature

With the constant comparisons made between wild wolves and the film's human killers, it feels like the narrative is trying very hard to frame these characters as majestic and mysterious wild humans, instead of the murderers of innocent randos that they are within the film. While murder likened to nature has been done before (NBC's Hannibal comes to mind), it... didn't quite work here.

One killed a child with no explanation beyond "the outside gets to you", while the other murders random people who may or may not get in the way of a planned revenge-murder that ended up not happening anyway, making all the other mass murder committed to get to there utterly pointless.

With the movie giving the audience little to empathise with in the characters it tried to elevate, the story ends up feeling self-serious without any self-awareness.

And despite all the wolf-imagery and wolf behaviour being referenced in the film, there is very little about the murderers in the film—who kill others for vague or paper-thin reasons—that reminds any person with access to Google in 2018 of wolves, pack-oriented animals who kill without malice, simply to eat and survive.