Hold The Dark Review: 4 Ups & 3 Downs

Ups

4. The First Half

The entire first half of the film feels like the great movie it was meant to be—quiet, cold, full of mounting dread, and a mystery that viewers were almost afraid to solve, with a creeping madness in Riley Keough's Medora Sloane that elevated the material, giving it a surreal edge.

It also benefited from being the first half, since most of the questions introduced and posed in the film had yet to be answered, something that only made the last half of the film unsatisfying.

From the strange and perceptive old native woman to the urgent, but largely unsurprised reactions of the villagers to finding a dead body after the deaths of two other children, to Medora Sloane whispering to herself about what was outside the window and accosting Russell Core in the dead of night, and even the equally isolating yet opposing introduction of Vernon Sloane as a soldier in the desert—everything about the first half is poetry in form and motion, the dialogue exchanged between Medora Sloane and Core in the beginning as unnerving as the atmosphere and acting.