Mark Reviews Movies: THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 8, 2020

Writer/director Jim Cummings' The Wolf of Snow Hollow is so odd, so tonally inconsistent, and so against the grain of genre expectations that it's either an ingenious work of subversion or a giant mistake. The argument could be made either way, really, depending on one's perspective and expectations. It's a constant source of fascination, for sure, and given the choice between some sort of formulaic routine and an almost indescribably off-kilter piece of experimentation, we should probably choose the latter. It at least gives us something to ponder, for good or for ill.

That's the case with Cummings' film, which is far from any simple definition of "bad." It's simply different and strange and ambitious beyond the apparent simplicity of its premise. That premise has to do with a series of grisly murders in a small Utah town, where there is usually one murder every two years.

The first killing is particularly grotesque, as a woman, who grew up in this place and has returned on a vacation with her boyfriend, is mauled and has her reproductive organs removed. The police arrive at the scene, and despite the horror of the corpse left behind, they seem mostly unmoved by the crime. Well, that's not exactly accurate. They're moved, for sure, but primarily toward petty bickering amongst themselves. A couple of cops are certain an animal had to have done this, and considering the level of corporeal damage and the size of the wounds, that animal would have to be something supernatural—a werewolf, most likely.

John (Cummings), another cop and the son of the local Sheriff Hadley (the late Robert Forster, in an alternately amusing and affecting performance), disagrees—and strongly. Such a hypothesis isn't just unlikely. It's downright insane, laughable, and infuriating. John, a recovering alcoholic, makes his point clear with words, which quickly become insults, which quickly turn to slapping a fellow deputy or two and getting into an on-the-snowy-ground wrestling match with one particular annoyance.

One of the stranger elements of this story, in which we witness a werewolf—or a convincing facsimile of one—attack and slaughter assorted victims when the full moon comes around, is that it isn't really a horror tale. There are horrors here—intense confrontations resulting in bloody carnage set to screams. There's also a study of John, whose own yells of contempt with his colleagues or shock at the bloodied messes are intercut with the werewolf attacks.

He is an angry, egotistical, uncertain, and entitled man, whose life is like an out-of-control train that has only briefly slowed on its way toward an inevitable collision. The killings and the surrounding failures to do anything about them are putting more fuel into that engine fire. With the assorted problems in his life, of which the gruesome murders are only a side note, he's speeding up toward destruction.

The strangest—and possibly the most distancing, off-putting—thing about this film, though, is how Cummings—as a writer, director, and actor—plays John as a dark, pathetic joke. To be clear, the film is filled with humor—even more so than it is with horror. The cops are incompetent. The Sheriff is bumbling mess. John's ex-wife and daughter can't stand him and make their disdain plain.

They have some excuses, at least. The cops are trying but are overwhelmed by a cunning, deadly foe. The Sheriff, while theoretically close to retirement and suffering from a heart murmur, is so devoted to the job that he ignores the obvious. The ex-wife and daughter have plenty of reasons to find fault in John.

As for John, his alcoholism is only symptom of some deeper failing of character. He doesn't have an excuse. He's just a complete, total, and seemingly irredeemable mess of insecurity, rage, and an inability to even acknowledge these flaws, let alone try to do anything of substance about them.

On paper, the character wouldn't seem to be funny in the slightest, but Cummings' ability to make John a constant source of humor is the film's most obvious success. We don't laugh at John because he's a pathetic mess of an excuse for a man. We laugh at him because he's a pathetic mess of an excuse for a man who cannot comprehend or help how much of a mess he is. It's his blind ignorance that's wickedly funny.

While the film shows that (John relapses, becomes more unhinged, and even has to attempt some real parenting for his daughter, played by Chloe East), some horror and a mystery unfold, too. That works well enough, even if the killings—so cruel (notably, the reveal of a tiny coffin) and nasty (One victim raises her arm, only to discover that more than half of it is missing)—are undermined by the jokiness, while the final answer to the killer's identity feels anticlimactic (One has to recall a single line of dialogue from a background character to even understand how someone figures out a key piece of information).

Such matters are, ultimately, just an easy-to-digest rationale for Cummings' real goal here, which has little to do with horror and a murder mystery. He's determined to present a character, whose faults are both highlighted by and shown to be minor amidst the violence and suffering surrounding him, and to make us laugh at his shortcomings, while also leaving room for him to find some small, if relatively considerable, redemption. The Wolf of Snow Hollow may be a tonally dissonant mashup of genre and ideas, but its daring to be just that and try to get away with it is the film's source of excitement.

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