The Grey

UK Release Date. 27 January 2012
Certification. 15
Running Time. 1 hour 57 mins
Director. Joe Carnahan
Cast. Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Liam Neeson, Anne Openshaw, Dallas Roberts.
Rating. 54%

Review.

In some aspects, The Grey is the archetypal survival thriller, depicting the practicalities of surviving in the wilderness - the primal need for fire, shelter, water and food. In other aspects, The Grey is a surprisingly dark melodrama that explores morality, masculinity, and the inevitability of our own existence.

It largely succeeds as both.

Joe Carnahan's film follows a group of oil field workers in Alaska. After boarding a plane bound for Anchorage, the plane crashes, leaving only seven men alive in the sub-zero expanse of the Arctic wilderness. The plot is seemingly straightforward - can the group of men survive one day longer, against the extreme cold and the vicious, aggressive pack of wolves that inhabit the area? 

Rather than compete with other memorable plane crash sequences - Alive, Cast Away, The Mountain Between Us, Plane, and Society Of The Snow - Carnahan sensibly strips down the scene to its bare essentials. No dramatic music or editing cues to let you know of the impending disaster. Nothing but the terror on the men’s faces as the plane tears apart mid-air.

After the visceral plane crash sequence, John Ottway (Liam Neeson) comforts a dying man. Instead of telling him everything will be OK, Ottway tenderly cradles the man’s head in his hands and delivers words nobody wants to hear - "Listen, you’re going to die, that’s what’s happening.” He continues, “It’s alright, it will slide over you, it’ll start to feel warm, nice and warm.” Ottway encourages the dying man to think about his daughter, “Let her take you.” The action genre tends to be dominated by testosterone-filled brouhaha that means and stands for little. Unexpected, surprisingly deep, and extremely moving, it’s rare for a scene with this kind of dramatic weight to appear 20 minutes into an action film. The death profoundly registers and sets a hell of a tone for the remainder of the film to live up to.

Indeed, The Grey offers more reflection than some might typically expect from a Joe Carnahan film [his previous two films were Smokin' Aces and The A-Team]. The director uses the survivalist premise of the film to instead explore masculinity through its almost exclusively male cast and the idea of how strong men are supposed to react in extreme situations. Every nihilistic decision these men make ultimately comes down to accepting one of two fates - give up and die, or fight, albeit to put off death for another moment. 

Liam Neeson’s performance is impressive. It is so much more than merely another badass role he’s carved out in the latter part of his career. There’s a haunting, walking-wounded quality to Neeson’s performance, staring at us with cold, dead eyes, and a face filled with murderous rage. Watching Neeson's character mourn his on-screen wife, wandering in the snow looking for purpose and meaning, but finding nothing but the remaining shreds of his own resolve, takes on new significance given that The Grey was shot in 2011, less than two years after his wife, actress Natasha Richardson, died of an epidural hematoma days after a skiing accident. 

It would be all too easy (and unfair) to label The Grey a survival film merely concerned with a group of men battling wolves. Instead, The Grey is a harrowing account of survival and morality when faced with the unrelenting nature of the wild. The wolves are obviously important, but they are merely an extension of the unavoidable fact of nature - everything dies. Portrayed as mostly a haunting presence throughout the film - existing on the peripheries, always present through their howls and glowing eyes, but rarely entering the scene except to dispatch the characters - the wolves act as a metaphor for death. Thus, in some respect, The Grey is not really a film about wolves at all.