The winter is upon us, and with the cold and the frost, the terrible chill that travels through the hearts of men is also felt. Crimes in these desolate, forsaken settings are often all the more brutal and unforgiving, the frozen tundras bringing forth the brutality in the common man. Greed, lust, and revenge reverberate across these films, and in their settings, we find common themes of our inability to control nature, our inability to control ourselves, and the pain we wrought on those we love. There’s blood in the snow, and the predators gather on the dark edge in these three thrillers.
In Wind River, we follow Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a local ATF agent as he guides Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) a junior FBI agent, through the frigid Montana winter on the trail of whoever killed a local Native woman. The film is a dark tragedy, as it’s through the eyes of these outsiders that we explore the troubles of the Shoshoni and Arapaho tribes. Highlighting the injustices of bureaucracy, and the loneliness that can be born in desolation, director Taylor Sheridan creates a world all on its own. Stark and barren as the souls of murderers, Wind River is a powerful display of filmmaking in the realm of the frozen thriller.
Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan similarly explores the darkness that lurks in lonely hearts, but it explores the themes from the subject’s viewpoint. In the film, we follow Hank (Bill Paxton), a mild-mannered accountant, as he, his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob’s uncouth friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) as they stumble across a crashed plane with three million dollars and a dead body. The trio initially decides to split the money after a set amount of time (in case anyone comes looking for it), only for greed, paranoia, and betrayal to take hold of them all. In addition to our three would-be criminals, we see Hank’s wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) turn from a quiet, small town librarian into a Lady Macbeth-like figure, whispering sweet seductions and solutions into her husband’s ear. The film is a slow descent into chaos and darkness, and in the end, we are left feeling completely at a loss, as the blood stains the snow and the hands of our remaining characters.
Lastly, in Hold the Dark, we follow as retired wolf hunter Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) is summoned to an isolated Alaskan community by a woman who has recently lost her son. Requesting Core’s help in hunting the wolf pack that killed her boy, Core is instead met with an infestation of insanity and depravity in this small community. A deeply dark and twisted tale about the nature of humanity and revenge, and the express differences between the natural and supernatural within us all. Core is at first just a pawn, used by a sick woman in the schemes she feels are needed to bring her husband home from war, only to find himself constantly switching between the role of prey and predator.
The thread of predator and prey is one of the many themes that link these three icy thrillers. Each of these films plays with the cat-and-mouse formula in various ways. The most traditional one is Hold the Dark, but even there the concept is twisted. Core is at first hunting the wolves, and then hunting the woman who hired him to protect her, and finally ends up being hunted by Medora (Riley Keough) and Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) when the two psychopaths rekindle their love. Core, a man who has spent his life hunting the wolf (a maneater) almost loses his life when facing not the enemy who has faced most of his life, but when he is facing the supposed civility of man. Mankind, even when covered in the thin grace of superiority, are predators even to each other.
This also plays a part in A Simple Plan, albeit in a more taciturn way. Hank is secretly a predator throughout the film, a crocodile hiding just beneath the still waters, ready to snap when the time strikes. His insistence on his relative innocence is contrasted with his consistent descent into further depravity. By the end of the film, Hank allows the sheriff (who is his friend) to be murdered, then kills the sheriff’s murderer, followed by his own brother, all in the pursuit of money. The slow realization of the depths of darkness Hank is capable of is much like Medora and Vernon discovering their psychopathy. While Hank rages against this darkness, never fully accepting what he has done, the couple embraces the horrors and is rewarded their freedom. Hank approached the point of no return between human and animal, and turning his back on it has cursed him with guilt til the end of his days.
The hunt for predators, both the animals and the humans, is at the forefront of Wind River. Cory Lambert is brought in not to hunt man, but to rid the area of a dangerous cougar. It’s only upon the discovery of Natalie’s body that his objective shifts and FBI Agent Jane Banner is brought in. Even then, Cory continues going after the natural threat of the cougars. It’s only upon finally confronting the cougar that he can realize who Natalie’s murderers are. By looking upon the predator nature has provided, we see where the threat truly lies. Pushing the concept of humanity versus nature, Wind River sides with nature is the better of the two, the just of the two. Humans are compulsive, harsh, bitter, evil in this film. Nature, while brutal, is also unbiased. Natalie’s ability to run for miles in the brutal cold before succumbing compared to the inability of Pete shows that, while unforgiving, nature can sift right from wrong better than humanity.
Wind River and Hold the Dark both also play with the myth of the Native Americans. Native Americans have often been sidelined and dehumanized within Hollywood films, and these films play upon the myths perpetuated by the film industry. In Wind River, the film specifically speaks on the hardships faced by Native communities, and the bureaucracy in place that often allows the exploitation of these communities to continue. Natalie’s murder can be investigated by the FBI, but her rape can’t. The tribal police can arrest a criminal unless they are white. The film is about injustice, how the greed of man corrupts and destroys, and by focusing on a microcosm in the case of Natalie Hanson, writer-director Taylor Sheridan is able to create an emotional connection between the statistics and the human cost.
The exoticism that Native American characters have been boxed into is brought forth in Hold the Dark. Here, a peripheral character (played by the wonderful Tantoo Cardinal) warns Russell Core that Medora “knows evil”. Her vague and otherworldly way of speaking follows the tropes we are used to seeing in these films, and her off-screen death seems to imply truth in her warnings. But it’s in another character, Cheeon, that we see the bitter satire of this character. Cheeon, a friend of Vernon’s, assists him in his murders and his tracking of Medora. Cheeon speaks bluntly and obviously and brutally murders many police in a massive shootout. Cheeon is a response to the myth, a man of brutality and viciousness ready to kill for the fun of it. He holds no spiritualism, no false prophecies, and it’s in his portrayal of Native Americans in true modernity that director Jeremy Saulnier is able to comment on the tropes.
The contrast of nature and modernity, of the untameable wilderness, is seen again in the strongest link between these three films: the snow. More specifically, the way that tracks and tracks in the snow reveal the motivations of our characters and how the mysteries in these films unravel around tracks. In A Simple Plan, tracks are to blame for the downfall of their entire plan. Wind River centers around a professional tracker, and the final act is signaled by the discovery of tracks. Hold the Dark likewise follows a tracker, but also shows the faultiness in the tracks we find. Finding ourselves and the paths we choose to take are of the utmost importance in these thrillers, as nature will betray our motives.
One of the many cascading mistakes made in A Simple Plan is the idea Sarah has about covering up the tracks made in the snow. When the gang of three initially discovers the plane, they plan on leaving it undiscovered until the spring or someone comes looking for it. Their tracks, though, betray their finding. Attempting to hide their tracks leads to Hank killing the farmer Dwight Stephanson, which then leads to Hank being blackmailed, and so on and so forth. The first sin here was attempting to hide, attempting to fool a natural way. Hank, Jacob, and Lou made tracks, they made a path, they made a decision. Hank’s attempts to cover this decision only lead to things spiraling out of control, six dead bodies, and a bunch of burned money. Had Hank left the tracks he could have saved everyone. The decision to be greedy could not be undone.
With Wind River, we have a professional animal tracker in Cory and a human tracker in Jane who, working in tandem, discover the horrible acts of the oil workers. Because of the vast swaths of land they have to traverse, snowmobiles are used, and tracks of both man and animal are hard to follow. Jane’s inability to parse the people of these lands (let alone the lands themselves) is what causes her to be caught off guard when the oil workers go on the assault. Jane is not a bad agent, she is simply out of her element. She is tracking humans when she needs to be tracking animals. This is why Cory is the one to discover the truth about the workers and can save Jane during the shootout. The landscape revealed to him their true characters. This is what makes the death of Pete so important, as he is returned to this nature, left to freeze forever in the barren tundra that revealed his true heart.
Nature again reveals the truth in Hold the Dark. When Core initially tracks down the wolf pack he believes he is there to hunt, he discovers they could not be committing the murders that Medora has told him about. He knows wolves, knows their habits, and when watching them knows these are not killers. It’s his knowledge of tracking that makes him realize that Medora is the true wolf, her sheep’s clothing quickly shedding when Core discovers Bailey’s body. Vernon dons the wolf mask when he initiates his hunt for his wife, and when they meet they first fight before mating. This is the behavior Core knows well from his wolf studies, further showing the complete descent from man the two have regressed to. Core’s tracking only works when he is following them, as they are the true wolves of the story, much like the oil workers are the animals in Wind River.
Thrillers set in these snowscapes are bitter and ruthless, and center on the descent of humanity. Each of these films ends not in victory but in survival (if that). These terrains are not meant for us, the final frontiers that nature refuses to be conquered upon. Our minds and morals are not meant to be stretched to the bounds of the frozen air. They freeze up, snap, shatter upon minor pressures, and without minds and morals we revert to monsters. The calm, stillness seen across a snowy field is not pristine; it is death, waiting for the follies of man, and these films show the depravity those follies can be.