2020 In Review: The Wolf of Snow Hollow
AKA: A dark comedy about a werewolf, but really a murder mystery and self commentary about personal issues, and the anxieties we made along the way
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When writer-director-star Jim Cummings debuted his 2018 dark comedy Thunder Road, he had something special on his hands; a broken-hearted statement on death acting as a high-anxiety commentary on divorce wrapped up in a police drama. It was funny, sad, awkward, beautiful, and would have been difficult to top. In his second debut, Cummings bites a little deeper with The Wolf of Snow Hollow, this time creating both a pleasantly dark horror-comedy as well as a literal metaphor with a werewolf as the subject matter.
Cummings, once again returning to write and direct, plays another distraught police officer, this time as John Marshall, an alcoholic single father trying to maintain not just his role as chief, but as helpful parent to his teenage daughter, and faithful son to his elderly father (the late Robert Forster, who the film is dedicated to). Most of all, and comedically so, Marshall attempts to hold on desperately to his remaining sanity as his sobriety begins to slip, upon the grizzly murders in the small town of Snow Hollow falling suspect to, what else, but a goddamned werewolf.
Much like he did in Thunder Road, Cummings understands the source material with his second film and what actually drives the fleshed out characters, as flesh begins to literally unearth itself among the bloody crime scenes. Snow Hollowvery easily could have fallen prey to a silly horror movie exploiting gore and terror simply to please genre fans, but Cummings is far too interested in tearing apart his own central character, and perhaps that’s why he works so well as the paranoid protagonist in John Marshall.
We follow Marshall very closely throughout the entire film and part of the pure comedy in Snow Hollow is witnessing Cummings play the character becoming slowly unhinged as he begins to sneak booze and aggressively attack his fellow officers for believing in werewolves.
The film is filled with arguments and conflicts among the characters; fights in a cafe with an ex-wife, awkward conversations about pepper spray with an estranged daughter, ride-along dialogues between Marshall and his partner detective Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). These scenes are followed by anxiety-ridden moments where the camera doesn’t break as Marshall, at a bloody crime scene, is yelling at his squad; his anger directed more towards the notion of grown adults speculating the killer being a werewolf rather than the killer even being on the loose. We watch Cummings lose his mind in real time, his raw humanity oozing through the horror, these moments ending up the most comedic. The more bleak the murders get, the crazier Marshall becomes, and inevitably the funnier the movie ends up being.
Like a monster movie buried within Fargo, Snow Hollow masquerades as a Coen Bros style dark murder mystery, endlessly chattering quirky dialogue; at its very core a comedic commentary on much more personal issues. The film may literally be about a deranged cop in denial about the existence of a monster, but it’s also metaphorically about a broken man unable to care for his family or his job, in denial of his creeping alcoholism. Perhaps Marshall is the monster itself. Either way, Snow Hollow is a loud metaphor movie, but Cummings somehow makes it work in a terrifying and comical way.
*20 points to Cummings
Grade: B+
