Critics reviews

The tight, compressed, precise style of Blue Ruin and Green Room has been replaced by something more draggy and ambient. . . . Saulnier can do brooding (as in Blue Ruin) and brutal (as in Green Room), but he isn’t ready to get metaphysical, or the material for his first adaptation doesn’t suit him as much as it would seem.

Saulnier’s His visual flair remains the only consistently appealing part of “Hold the Dark,” a thriller that aspires to something deeper but never figures out what.

There’s a thin line between inexplicable and fashionably incoherent.

It gives me no pleasure to slag on Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark; his previous two films, Blue Ruin and Green Room, were good bleak fun, laconic in general, tersely amusing when dialogue emerged. But Hold the Dark has no interest in being fun; it’s much more interested in being taken Seriously, as a Serious Movie, and that’s a very bad trade.

You know you're in the hands of a born filmmaker from the first scene. . . . All the survivalist/supernatural trappings that follow can't help but pale in comparison.

The ensuing violence, as in all of Saulnier’s films, plays as excruciatingly real, graphic yet never exploitative. His form of brutality is weighted with a higher, emotional purpose.