The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Jim Cummings (2020)
‘Comedy’ ‘Horror’ ‘Mystery’ is how IMDb defines Jim Cummings’s second feature, following Thunder Road (2018). The layout of IMDb pages, with these various categories juxtaposed distinctly, can be inadvertently revealing of how a mash-up film works in practice, hopping between genres rather than fusing them. That’s not the case with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, whose writer-director-lead actor brings off a remarkable balancing act.
Serious crime in the (fictional) mountain town of Snow Hollow, Utah, happens once in a blue moon – until the night of a full moon, and the horrific murder of a young woman (Annie Hamilton), vacationing in the area with her boyfriend (Jimmy Tatro). Shortly before the attack, the woman hears a growl in the darkness; there’s a bloody paw print in the snow beside her mutilated corpse. The town sheriff, Hadley Marshall (Robert Forster), as well as being unused to investigating murder, is old and ill. His state of health isn’t the only thing that Hadley’s insomniac son John (Jim Cummings) is losing sleep over. John, too, is a police officer in the local force, as well as a member of a 12 Steps AA group, though he can hardly be termed a recovering alcoholic. His ex-wife (Rachel Jane Day) is threatening to try to take their teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who lives with John, away from him. Despite the turmoil in his life, he’s rational enough, along with his colleague Julia (Riki Lindholme), to be sure that his team’s on the hunt for a human rather than a lupine killer. John is especially enraged by Chavez (Demetrius Daniels), a fellow officer who reckons the culprit is a werewolf. Julia doesn’t expect any different. As she calmly reminds John, Chavez ‘thinks Men in Black is a documentary’.
The cinematographer Natalie Kingston does full justice to the awesome beauty of the Utah mountainscape. Ben Lovett’s score is knowingly ominous but ominous nonetheless. Both things bring to mind Twin Peaks – as do the various oddballs in the Snow Hollow sheriff’s office and diners. Whether or not he’s consciously taken lessons from David Lynch in working comedy, horror and mystery into a coherent whole, this is what Jim Cummings achieves. The nervous irritation of his characters, especially John, works up a head of steam that might seem to jeopardise the thriller element yet doesn’t: you’re always keen to find out the solution to the crimes taking place at each full moon. How quickly (in screen time) they become plural, functions as a satire of serial-killer dramas – again, without detracting from interest in the cockeyed police investigation. We see the huge figure of the wolf-man, on hind legs, laying into his victims; we hear what he does to their bodies; but the film is pretty discreet in what it shows of the physical results of the mayhem. (The smart editing is by Patrick Nelson Barnes and R Brett Thomas.) Eschewing a gore-fest reflects, on Cummings’s part, an intelligent distance from the visceral traditions of horror that never curdles into smugness. Taxidermy is an inevitably creepy art; its screen practitioners are traditionally dubious customers. Paul Carnury (Will Madden) hardly subverts the tradition but Cummings handles this effectively. His droll dialogue reinforces the Twin Peaks connection yet The Wolf of Snow Hollow‘s glancing dry humour feels increasingly its own.
Like Jim Arnaud in Thunder Road, John is a cop with a failed marriage and a daughter whose custody is at issue. The earlier film – with the strapline ‘Officer Arnaud loved his mother’ – opens with, and is chiefly memorable for, Jim’s eulogy at the mother’s funeral service. In The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Jenna, who’s soon to start college and is exasperated by her father’s hyper-protectiveness, asks if he thinks he’s like he is because his mother left him when he was a kid. Also like Jim, John struggles to control his anger and his short fuse at work is the harbinger of a full-scale breakdown. A major difference from Thunder Road is the presence of the protagonist’s father but Hadley, since he’s both his boss and at death’s door, ties John in further emotional knots: when Hadley finally succumbs to heart disease, it sends his son over the edge. As John’s personal problems increasingly dominate the story, the echoes from Thunder Road are loud enough to distract the attention of viewers familiar with Cummings’s previous feature. It’s fortunate that both the protagonist and the film he’s in stage a rally for the climax to proceedings, when the killer-wolf’s identity is revealed. John’s rehabilitation may not be complete; since that’s convincing in itself, it strengthens the film’s recovery.
Cummings’s performance is a big step up from his work in front of the camera in his last film. He confirms, notably in the alcoholics group sequences, the talent for sardonic throwaway that he showed in Thunder Road; he also achieves a new emotional authenticity, particularly in John’s exchanges with his daughter, well played by Chloe East, and his father. According to Wikipedia, Matt Miller, one of the producers, ‘had known Robert Forster from a previous project, and sent the script to his agent. … Jim Cummings said they “expected a polite ‘no'” but Forster chose to take the role because he viewed it as “a dramatic movie about a father-son relationship, and complications of aging and health”’. Thanks to his presence and the good writing, Forster realises what he saw in the material – with ease and wit, even though his own health was declining when shooting took place in early 2019. He died a few months later, a full year before the film’s North American release in October 2020. Cummings, who knows to give centre stage to Robert Forster in their scenes together, dedicates The Wolf of Snow Hollow to this fine character actor.
Riki Lindholme also shines as Julia – blending sanity and eccentricity, making her character increasingly admirable. You want to cheer when Julia eventually inherits Hadley’s star. She’s quietly but definitely aware that women aren’t really seen as up to the job: a sheriff’s cap, she observes, isn’t designed for a head with a ponytail. Cummings has a nice line in woke insights that are deadpan but trenchant. John, after some background reading on lycanthropy, asks Julia, ‘You think women have had to deal with this shit since the Middle Ages?’ She doesn’t say anything in response, preferring an eloquent straight look. When Jenna eventually leaves for college, the still-anxious John gives her condoms and a gun. As she settles into her dorm room, her father takes his leave. On the way out, he hears a couple of male students describing the girls in the new intake as ‘fresh meat’. Those are the last words in the script. John pauses for a moment before walking away.
After watching Thunder Road, I said I was keen to see more from Jim Cummings. I’d not made much effort to do so – I didn’t even know he’d made this second feature before noticing that a third, The Beta Test (co-written and co-directed with P J McCabe), was showing at this month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. I booked to see The Beta Test online only to be told a couple of days beforehand that it wouldn’t, after all, be available remotely. It was screened in Edinburgh for a couple of days, though, and, according to a review on the Filmhounds website, will be coming to British cinemas (via Blue Finch Releasing) in October this year. The Wolf of Snow Hollow has made me all the keener to follow Cummings’s progress. I’ll try to make a better job of it this time around.
17 August 2021