The Wolf of Snow Hollow Review: A Swan Song Worthy of Robert Forster

Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Photo: Orion Classics

Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow is set in a small, picturesque mountain town that’s being plagued by a series of murders. The victims are torn apart in a manner that suggests a large wolf, though there’s also a sense of control and calculation to the acts that implies human intelligence. Soon, the townies are talking werewolves while the police haplessly attempt to find the perpetrator. Throughout the film, certain scenes involving the police, unofficially headed by Officer John Marshall (Cummings) in place of his ailing father, Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster), are played for broad comedy in the key of something like Broken Lizard’s Super Troopers, while other scenes imaginatively and uncomfortably tap into contemporary anxieties about the inherent power of law enforcement.

Strikingly, John isn’t a conventional hero who maintains his cool in the heat of crisis, but a hothead who doesn’t have nearly the control over his unit that he—and, by extension, viewers—initially believe. John snaps at his fellow officers pointlessly, sometimes after they’ve asked good questions that conflict with his presumptions, and he has a habit of physical confrontations, sometimes within eyeshot of an increasingly dubious press. As an actor and filmmaker, Cummings lucidly portrays John as a destabilizing agent, a recovering alcoholic who’s pushed by pressures of the case and family to fall once again off the wagon. In one particularly disturbing scene, John brushes up against the killer on the verge of committing another murder and fires his shotgun wildly into the night, without any consideration for the collateral damage. John’s behavior grows wilder and more erratic, including taking bourbon with his coffee in the morning at work in front of anyone who cares to notice, and Cummings shows how the other officers, though concerned and sometimes resentful, cover up for him out of respect to the legacy of Hadley, whose own bad heart is being covered up by John.

Which is to say that Cummings isn’t in the business of glorifying rogue police officers, though he doesn’t offer John or the other men and women in his unit up as fashionable indictments of the entire profession either. Cummings is intensely empathetic to the strains John bears, embodying the character’s anger with curt, unhinged outbursts that are initially amusing, then scary, then devastating. And, yes, some of these pressures are understood to spring from the populace’s hatred of the police, whose propensity for decency is casually, nearly invisibly represented by Officer Julia Robeson (Riki Lindhome). This pressure cooker of conflicting cultures and old and new sensibilities is further complemented by anecdotes in which small-town good old boys are chastised for their racism and homophobia, and by the fact that the killer is a sexist who preys on young, attractive women—an “addiction” that renders him an outcast not unlike John. These textures aren’t offered up as obligatory window dressing for a monster movie as they’re The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s reason for being.

Advertisement

Cummings’s willingness to deconstruct small-town incestuous-ness, while acknowledging the homey attraction of an intimate place in which everyone knows everyone’s name and eats the same meals in the same diner, is unmistakably reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The filmmaker’s risky mixture of comedy and violence clearly owes a debt to David Lynch as well—a debt that’s acknowledged by Forster’s presence here in his final role before his death. Forster’s Hadley suggests a continuation of the character he played in Twin Peaks: The Return, and Cummings fashions a swan song worthy of the legend. Hadley is a poignant fading titan whom John feels he cannot equal, and so the aging man suggests a past version of America, a dream from which we have awakened in order to face a nightmare. Cummings doesn’t have Lynch’s formal daring, but he has reinvigorated an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.

Score: 
 Cast: Jim Cummings, Riki Lindhome, Robert Forster, Chloe East, Jimmy Tatro, Marshall Allman, Neville Archambault, Annie Hamilton, Will Madden, Jessica Park, Laura Coover, Kelsey Edwards, Skyler Bible  Director: Jim Cummings  Screenwriter: Jim Cummings  Distributor: Orion Classics  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.