The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Snow Hollow, a small mountain community in Utah, is struck by a series of incredibly violent killings. With the ripped apart state of the victims, it isn’t even clear at first if these are animal attacks or products of a really rather mad killer. Given these facts, the wolf-like descriptions coming from witnesses, and the mix of animal ferocity and cleverness in the murders, one might even think the killer is some kind of werewolf.

The local police is ill prepared for this sort of case, and help isn’t even coming once they ask for it. Nominally, the little police department is commanded by Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster), but the man is ailing in body, mind, and spirit, so the actual work falls on the shoulders of Hadley’s son, John Marshall (Jim Cummings). John, a man barely keeping dry via a twelve step program, fighting against violent urges, a feeling of rage against himself and the world, and all manner of self-destructive behaviour while also attempting to keep the peace with his ex-wife (Rachel Day) and rebuild the cracked relationship with his daughter Jenna (Chloe East), is not actually in any state to withstand the mounting pressures of the investigation. As the number of bodies rises and very few clues that would make any logical sense turn up, he breaks down increasingly. Things aren’t helped by the fact that apart from John, there’s really only one member of the police force qualified for more than writing parking tickets, Julia Robson (Rikki Lindhome). Actually, Julia is rather more qualified and mentally better prepared for the case than John himself, only, she isn’t related to the Sheriff, and woman.

The first time I tried watching Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow I bounced of it quickly and forcefully. Today, I’d call it one of the best movies of the last ten years or so (at least), so clearly, I can be a bit of a fool sometimes. Of course, the film’s very dry sense of humour, its slow and careful characterisation and its very particular ideas of what can and can not be called a horror movie are the sort of thing not everyone will tune into even on repeated tries, which is neither a failure of the movie nor one of any given viewer.

If and when one starts to get the movie’s – or really Cummings’s given that he directed, wrote and plays the lead – perspective, one begins encountering a film whose horrors are found in more than just its handful of gory corpses and its tale of a werewolf (or is it a serial killer?) murder series taking place in a small town. Rather, the film’s heart lies in its treatment of John’s struggles, a downward spiral he, like many of us with psychological troubles, can see and experience but feels helpless to break free from even though there is help for him to be had, and which eventually leads in a very traditionally male way to a place of violence that can end up set against himself or against others. The film finds moments of humour in John’s increasing self-destructiveness, but it’s never making fun of the psychological struggles and failures themselves. These, it treats with surprising compassion, never excusing some of the shittiness John gets up to, but treating it with a degree of delicacy and sadness you wouldn’t exactly expect in a werewolf movie. Of course there are clear parallels between John and his behaviour and the wolf, both partaking in the same male coded propensity for violence, just not ending up in the same place, exactly. Since the film treats this aspect subtly, it makes a rather more interesting, or really, more personal argument about men and violence than you usually get in this sort of thing. It also suggests a way to betterment for at least one of its violent men.

Also sad and very subtle is the portrayal of the relationship between John and his father. There’s a well-observed understanding of difficult family relations and the pain that’s part of love under these circumstances on display that’s rare and unexpected in any medium. That one half of the father/son duo is portrayed by Robert Forster shortly before his death adds even more poignancy.

Cummings is just as adept at the larger scale of portraying a community under pressure as he is at the micro-scale of family relationships and personal breakdowns. Snow Hollow quickly feels like a real place with real, if slightly grotesque, people, a place that follows recognizable rules of social connections, that feels lived in and believable. It also feels like a physical space, snow and darkness and blood taking on extra weight by it.

That The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s moments of suspense and gore are also rather excellent feels nearly beside the point in this context.