2/6/2024 0 Comments Wolf of snow hollow chloe eastLindhome pulls double duty conveying not only her own competent character but in evening out her costar’s mania. The lead character is just ill conceived – we don’t ever become invested in his conflict with his daughter and, frankly, Cummings overplays the part, going from relatively stable to manic in ten seconds flat and never letting up. The problem lies with a screenplay that attempts to equate Marshall’s downwardly spiraling breakdown with the motivation behind the slayings, one which never connects the dots. Ben Lovett ("The Wind," "I Trapped the Devil") contributes a score that complements the film’s shifting tones. Two additional murders and an attempted third are perfectly staged, the towering wolf shown in just the right amount, enough to suggest the creature’s eerily beautiful menace. Production designer Charlie Textor and all the assorted townspeople flesh it out perfectly. The strain quickly sends John back to the bottle, but as his behavior spins out of control, the dependable and efficient Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome, "Knives Out") is always there to pick up the slack.Ĭummings does a great job establishing the small town of Snow Hollow, picturesquely captured with gently falling snow in establishing shots by cinematographer Natalie Kingston. We soon learn John Marshall has been going to AA for six years and is divorced with a teenaged daughter, Jenna (Chloe East), who is coming to live with him at exactly the wrong time all while he is trying to protect his dad’s health by taking on a bigger role in Snow Hollow’s much maligned police department (why the latter is so is never really established). “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” is an enjoyable enough watch, but a from-left-field climax too derivative of “The Silence of the Lambs” adds to an overall feeling of mishandled narrative. His second film features a seemingly effortless, laugh out loud performance by the late Robert Forster, his last, as Marshall’s dad Sheriff Hadley and boasts an effective production, but Cummings’ psychological character study of ‘the beast within’ in parallel with a serial killing thriller never really meshes. Writer/director Jim Cummings made a big splash at Sundance in 2016 with the short, "Thunder Road," he later turned into a feature.
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