Review - The Wolf of Snow Hollow
If you’ve been a reader here on the website for a while or you know me personally, then you know that my two favorite fictional horror monsters are easily Frankenstein’s Monster and Werewolves. I can kind of relate to both in a weird way. That, and I just love real wolves. Well, really any animal in the canine world. Recently I found myself sitting on the couch for a few days, after some minor arthroscopic knee surgery, with some time to kill. So, I started knocking out some of the films in my rental list over on Amazon Prime. First there was Nolan’s latest, Tenet, which was entertaining and visually amazing (duh), but too long and too much thinking required going in. Then I watched something a few Horror Bound readers might also find interesting in Marvel’s The New Mutants. Again, entertaining, but they totally should have stuck with the hard “R” rating and gone all in on the horror aspect. Finally, I settled in with this little indie gem I’m writing about today.
I remember when 2020’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow did its week long run at our local art house theater back in October as part of its month long Halloween celebration. I saw a big white wolf on the one sheet and decided to click on the trailer immediately. It looked like a quirky little film that kind of didn’t know what it was supposed to be: comedy? Horror? Drama? No one in the cast caught my attention, except for late great screen legend, Robert Forster, so we kind of passed on it at the time. Although we did go back later in the month for a restored 35mm viewing of Carpenter’s The Thing, I mean, how could we not? Fast-forward a few months and lo and behold, it arrives on the Prime for rent. I immediately put it in my list and waited for the right moment to sit and watch.
I’ll admit, I’d never heard of writer, director, and star, Jim Cummings, before or seen his critically acclaimed feature film directorial debut, Thunder Road, in which he also starred. I just like werewolves, and that’s all I needed going in. Upon watching it, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, is indeed a hard film to categorize. It has elements of dark comedy, but it mostly leans in to fit more of the horror genre at large. But make no mistake, this is also a deep film that deals with the struggles of a recovering alcoholic trying to have a meaningful part in his teenage daughter’s life, all the while convincing his aging and sickly dad to retire from the sheriff’s office long past his due, and oh yeah, solve the grisly murders that have rocked the small town in which they all live.
Speaking of which, the fictional town of Wolf Hollow, Utah, plays an important a part in the film as everything and everyone else. It’s the start of winter when the film opens and the holidays are upon the residents of this quiet, sleepy, winter sport tourist destination. I’m very familiar with these kind of small towns, I grew up in one, and my best friend’s dad was a Sergeant on the local police force as well. I would laugh when he would tell me that the worst things that happened each week were cases of confiscating fireworks from kids or filing reports on vandalism to townsfolk’s mailboxes. Yeah, Wolf Hollow is this same kind of town. So you can imagine how the sheriff’s respond when an out-of-towner’s body is found mutilated just outside her vacation rental property. The body is mauled, limbs ripped off, and her genitalia has been torn out, nowhere to be found at the scene.
Robert Forster (Heroes, Twin Peaks) plays the aging Sheriff in charge of wrangling together his inexperienced deputies into solving the case and giving the townspeople some piece of mind. Jim Cummings stars in the role of his son, who looks to inherit his Dad’s position once he retires. He’s also the only one who wants to take on the task of solving the crime in-house, whereas his co-workers would much rather shuffle it off to the state police or FBI, and he’s the only one who believes it is a man doing the killings and not a werewolf, even after two more gruesome killings occur during full moons. But it’s really Riki Lindhome (Knives Out, The Lego Batman Movie) who steals the show in this one. She plays fellow law enforcement officer, Detective Julia Robson, but she really pulls everyone on the force together when it comes down to finding the killer and eventually acts as Cummings’ anchor when his whole world falls apart.
As I stated earlier, I’ve never seen anything else Cumming has done, but he truly plays Officer John Marshall as the textbook flawed protagonist. The film opens with him at an AA meeting, but that’s just the start. Throughout the course of the film, he fights with his ex-wife over their teenage daughter who’s about to start college on an athletic scholarship, all the while figuring out how to deal with his daughter’s budding sexual relationship with her boyfriend. Then there’s his aging and sick dad who just doesn't know when it’s time to quit against all his son’s pleading with him to just retire already. On top of all that, he has the whole town on his ass to solve the murders, a lazy troop of deputies unwilling to put in the work, and the battle inside his own head on whether the killings actually are being perpetrated by a supernatural beast.
I love character arcs, which is why I love Walter White so much, and when that journey can unfold over the course of ninety minutes or so, it is such engaging cinema. At one point, we see Officer Marshall wholly accept that this could very well be the work of a werewolf and he begins to comb the internet and stalk the local library for anything and everything he can find on the subject. But what I loved most is that you start to get the impression that Marshall is slowly losing his grip on everything, like at any moment he’s gonna explode and eventually he does. His dad dies, he catches his daughter half naked in her boyfriend’s truck, he attends funeral after funeral for the victims, townspeople accost him on the streets, until eventually he cracks and starts drinking again. And even that escalates. He starts with a single hidden beer in the cupboard, then a six-pack, then he’s drinking mouthwash from the bottle. I mean, he truly spirals.
So, it’s no surprise that when he does come across the suspect, he falls mistakenly into that as well, visiting him during other police business. Yes, at the end of the day, it turns out to have just been a man in a suit the whole time. But not just any man in any suit. The suspect is a six foot five taxidermist who made the suit himself from authentic animal parts, obviously. But at this point, Marshall is so unhinged that his foot pursuit of the suspect ends with him practically getting gutted himself, with only the savvy and cunning Detective Robson coming in at the last minute to save his ass and bag the killer herself. And so, with Marshall taking time off to be the Dad to his daughter he needs to be, the vacant position of Sheriff goes to Robson in the end, duly earned I might add.
The charm of The Wolf of Snow Hollow is that you never really know what the film is meant to be and there’s a certain discomfort in that, albeit a good one. You can’t help but laugh during some of the great comedic moments, but at the same time you can’t help but laugh uncomfortably at Marshall’s authentic and very real reactions to the dumpster fire that’s fallen in his lap either. In that way, this is very comparable to anything in the storied Coen brothers’ filmography and I would highly recommend this picture to anyone who’s a fan of Fargo or No Country for Old Men. But I would also say if you loved An American Werewolf in London, then this film is for you also. Or Se7en or Silence of the Lambs or any of those great modern thrillers! I guess, in a word, there’s probably something here for everyone. That’s why I’m giving it five out of five corpse fingers. Currently, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is only available for rent or purchase on any of your favorite streaming services.
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