Soon after the movie opens, there’s another challenge. A very hungry rogue wolf, one that apparently screwed up Joe’s hunting some time before, is back, and it’s up to some nasty stuff. In the movie’s first half hour Renée is keen to help her dad with the hunt for this malefactor, while Anne seems more interested in using this circumstance as a pretext to get the hell out of Dodge, buy a house where the normies live, and send Renée to an actual school, etcetera.
The wolf manifests itself, and is terrifying, but that’s not where the story settles; nor does the picture get much traction from the Mersaults’ domestic concerns.
What happens is, during his pursuit of wolfie, Joe comes upon a super-grisly crime scene. The corpse-littered forest clearing is a tableau no wolf could have created, unless this wolf has opposable thumbs with which to tie one of the dead folks to a tree. Mersault, operating under his own peculiar logic, declines to notify the authorities, and instead decides to stalk this killer on his own.
Contacting the authorities might not have done much good: as a couple of lackadaisical rangers explain to Anne when she goes down to the station after Joe goes missing, they don’t have “jurisdiction” in the area Anne’s pointing them to. And in addition, they say, the Mersaults ought not be living there anyway.
Soon a complication arises: Anne finds a bleeding man among the trees near the cabin, and she drags him inside. The wounded guy is played by Nick Stahl, so you immediately know that his character is on the up and up. Ar ar ar.
The sense of dread Linden wants to create may creep up on different viewers at different moments. If you have a hard time watching dead animals get skinned, and watching the skinner hang some of the animal’s wet, dripping innards on a line, you’re gonna be queasy from the get-go. While director Linden handles most of the constituent parts of the picture reasonably well, one sometimes wonders just what makes this film necessary.
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