The Grey

Review

It’s hard to think of a recent film with horror elements that has a happy ending. At worst, everyone dies. At best, everyone dies except the protagonist�who’s so damaged he or she might as well be dead. Maybe the unhappiest ending of all is the non-ending, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, the most irritating of many quasi horror pictures evincing a philosophical aversion to closure. It’s true that most of the seminal horror films of the last half-century end badly. But not all of them! Nowadays, happy endings just feel wrong, as if we’re too anxious or guilty about too many things to believe that we can overcome.

Consider Ottway (Liam Neeson), the hero of the grueling survival thriller The Grey. Early on, he sucks on a rifle and comes close to blowing his head off. And this is the fellow we’re supposed to root for to survive, when his plane goes down in Alaska and the seven men who emerge from amid the mangled bodies are set upon by a pack of wolves. Ottway is grieving over a separation from his wife, who appears in dreams and visions, and it’s difficult not to have morbid thoughts of Neeson’s late spouse, Natasha Richardson. As the dour Ottway leads the men across the snow toward a line of trees, wolves pick them off, one by one, tearing at jugulars and viscera and disappearing into mist or darkness. The skillful, cheerless director, Joe Carnahan, isn’t a sadist, but he’s cruel. There’s a bravura sequence from the vantage of a man as he plunges into a canyon, hitting tree branches all the way down, his little daughter appearing in a vision before the wolves descend. Neeson’s gravity elevates the action, and there’s a fine, prickly performance by an actor new to me, Frank Grillo, as the asshole of the group. (�This is Fuck City�population five and dwindling!�) But The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (2/6/12)