Hold the Dark offers more proof of ‘gore-sodden’ Jeremy Saulnier’s talent

Over a soda and a burger, Jeremy Saulnier is as nice a guy as you could hope to meet. He is cheerful, generous with his time and anecdotes and will probably insist on picking up the tab.

But put him behind a camera, and Saulnier becomes a bleak and gore-sodden soul.

Saulnier’s Hold The Dark has been on Netflix for a while now, although without much fanfare.

Hold the Dark is set in Alaska in the present day. Russell Core is a writer on wolf behaviour who is summoned to a remote village to hunt and kill a wolf – or wolves – that are blamed for the disappearance of a local child. Once there, Core realises quickly that no-one is quite what they seem – and that the wolves are the least of the dangers he faces.

Jeffrey Wright is a quiet and internalised presence as Core, while Riley Keough and Alexander Skarsgard are enjoyably quite bat-poo-insane as the parents of the missing boy. Long-time favourite James Badge-Dale turns up as a police officer who finds himself in the middle of the unfolding chaos and carnage.

As always, Saulnier’s framing and choreography are fantastic, even if the storytelling gets a little wayward and oblique.

Harder to find, but well worth the effort, Saulnier’s earlier Blue Ruin and Green Room are a pair of fantastically taut and credible thrillers. Blue Ruin (available to rent from GooglePlay, YouTube, Academy OnDemand and AroVision) stars Saulnier’s longtime friend and collaborator Macon Blair (he wrote Hold The Dark) as a drifter on a quest to revenge himself against the man who murdered his parents, 20 years before.

What follows is a blackly funny, minimalist thriller with some serious smarts and an astonishing body count.

Eight years after it debuted, Blue Ruin is still one of the most inventive and intelligent lowbudget thrillers I’ve ever seen.

The critical success of Blue Ruin allowed Saulnier to attract a couple of big names to his next project, notably Patrick Stewart and Anton Yelchin, in one of his last roles.

In Green Room (available to rent from GooglePlay, iTunes, Neon and YouTube), Yelchin plays a member of a punk band trapped by a gang of whitesupremacist skinheads after they stumble on a murder scene and a drug-dealing operation.

Green Room is an unusually tense and claustrophobic shocker, with scenes and images that will stay with you for days.

And seeing the usually genial Stewart as a murderous neo-Nazi elder is a treat. Hugely recommended.