The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

directed by Jim Cummings

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this movie with the hope that it might be a horror film, even though I had doubts. I was vaguely aware that Jim Cummings had made another film that people like (Thunder Road) and as far as I know it is not a horror movie. I also recently watched another killer wolf movie that turned out to be massively disappointing, so I was already wary and probably now slightly biased against wolf movies forever. What I'm trying to say is that from the beginning I was aware that I probably wasn't coming at The Wolf of Snow Hollow from the right angle. Despite this, and despite the fact that I really have no interest in watching Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow really surprised me by just how good it is.

So Jim Cummings, in addition to writing and directing, plays the lead character, an alcoholic cop. That alone might deter a lot of people from watching this, because if there's one thing the world has more than enough of, it's alcoholic cop movies. And cop movies in general. But this is a rare case where despite all the characters being cops, the job isn't applauded as some godlike duty. They're all still cops, and I wasn't swayed by any attempt to make them more relatable, but... it's important for the believability, and really, the overall likability of this movie that everybody isn't presented as saintly just because they're cops.

But Cummings' main character being an awful, uncaring father actually almost turned me off from the film as a whole in the beginning. The first example we see of him treating his family poorly is skewed so that it makes it look like his wife is the bitchy one, and that was a big red flag. I didn't like seeing a mom strawmanned as a nag for daring to point out to her ex-husband that he's missing milestones in his daughter's life. But I think the point of introducing the main character that way and making it look like the film itself was siding with him at first was so it would become more apparent later that his relationship with his daughter was terrible. The way the film deals with him is also his own journey from believing that his hard job and his stress gives him an excuse to just treat everybody else like objects to realizing that he's the bad guy.

So where does the wolf stuff come in? Well... I don't want to make it seem like there's no wolf stuff here, or imply that this movie would be unappealing to horror fans, because that might turn people like me away from watching this very good movie. I hesitate even to say that the wolf stuff isn't the point, because again, to me, if the wolf stuff isn't the point, who cares? I guess maybe this is a movie you gotta be tricked into watching; you have to believe it'll be something other than what it is so that you can be pleasantly surprised by what it is. There's just something about this movie, something about the way the characters were written and how life is presented as this farcical, nonstop barrage of unfortunate circumstances, that feels refreshing. The main character keeps getting hit with bad stuff and he keeps responding to it in the worst possible way, and the message is, like, yeah, this is all your fault, you can just be bad at life, you can go about it the wrong way and alienate all your loved ones because you truly are just being a bad dude. And this is funny- you might not think it could be, but somehow watching somebody repeatedly struggle with everything carries that shameful "at least that isn't me" humor, but it's also a little uncomfortable, because maybe it is you. This is an uncomfortable movie at times. I admire how it doesn't stick to a genre but takes the best parts of a lot of them to create something interesting and new.

I'm not sure how I felt about the ending, but I may just be too bitter and personally involved with absent father stories to feel genuinely moved by a redemption arc such as that. Auld Lang Syne playing the lead character out in his final act felt like ending enough for me, anything beyond that seemed shallow and predictable. Even without my own personal feelings, the last scene did feel like a bit of a shark jump that was uncharacteristically unrealistic for something like this film. But it didn't take away from how good the rest of it was.