The Grey
This is one of those movies in which halfway through it you are ticking off events as they are bound to happen (we’re only too familiar with standard operational procedure – it’s all genre is, really), and you are on the verge of a smug chortle. But something imperceptible happens that leaves you, fifty minutes later, wrung out with nervous tension and pensive about the tale’s entirely unforeseen ending. Ottway (Liam Neeson – my companion referred to him as ‘the world’s ugliest actor’, which I thought a stroke harsh) has a miserable job as a wildlife hit-man at an oil field in Alaska. His wife has left him (adding some poignancy to the mood must have been the recent death, in real life, of Neeson’s wife Natasha Richardson, after a skiing accident) and he is on the verge of suicide but – oh joyous serendipity – a wolf turns up and he shoots it instead. Then he’s on a flight out of there with a bunch of roughnecks who are due some R&R. The plane comes down in blinding snow – the crash, the best I’ve seen, is brilliantly terrifying – and Ottway finds himself the alpha male among a handful of survivors. They are up against not just the sub-zero environment, but a pack of wolves with a really bad attitude. Though it’s reasonable to hate Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, casting animals as homicidal maniacs seems excessively anthropocentric, but if you’re able to overlook that sad take on nature, the trek to safety becomes riveting. The boys’ numbers will dwindle – who didn’t know that? – and you can count them as they drop, but when it got down to the last four standing on the edge of a cliff, with the fangs behind them and the abyss below, I was well and truly wrapped-up in the suspense. I figured the bloke with the glasses would be next to go… Anyway, it’s not as silly as it sounds and, with moments of introspection and insight, the musing on life and death in Ottway’s father’s elegant poem makes it well worthwhile.

Martha Macy May Marlene
Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) and Macy May, as she is known by Patrick (John Hawkes), the charismatic, Charles Manson-like leader of the cultish commune to which she belongs, and Marlene, the identity offered by her and the other women members when answering the phone, are all the same person. Out of the public eye in a genteel rural location, what the impoverished group stands for, other than a strict hierarchy in which the girls eat after the boys and the ritual rape of new female inductees by Patrick, is never stated. Nor is it important, for this vagueness allows director Sean Durkin to focus sharply on the group’s suffocating obsession with itself and its adherence to manipulative Patrick’s rule. Martha runs away to re-unite, after two years, with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulsen), with whom she had fallen out – again there is next to no back-story to explain the siblings’ relationship. It forces us to start from scratch in figuring out what is going on, and in making our judgments without prejudice. Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) are welcoming at first, but it soon becomes apparent that Martha is psychologically unknowable to the couple – she thinks nothing of entering their room to lie on their bed while they are making love. And all the while, the eerie, nihilistic attraction of the commune is retaining its hold on her. Durkin (who also wrote the screenplay) tells his story of alienation and amorality with edgy, fleeting jumps between Martha’s two competing realities. A cold palette and a spare soundtrack, in which silence is a potent factor – the quietness and stillness of the murder scene compounds its horror – add to the unease. Olsen is fantastic, playing her part with a naïve sexuality and an unsettling, at times infuriating, blankness – what is happening inside her head we can never be sure of – while Hawkes, reprising the more menacing elements of his Teardrop from Winter’s Bone, epitomises the calculating sociopath. An ambiguous conclusion only cranks up the creepiness. Excellent.