I saw The Grey a couple of days ago.

Spoilers.

I was completely ready for this film to be a Liam Neeson film: the unique brand of heroic action films that undoubtedly need to star Neeson to be named as credible (e.g. Taken, Unknown). I love those films. They’re not outstanding works of film by any means, but they don’t have to be. I was ready for The Grey to be the same sort of thing. I was completely and utterly wrong.

There’s such depth of meaning in this narrative, but not carried in any way which forces it on the audience. There are a few emotional speeches and sequences which relate to underlying character development, but these can be glossed over as intersection the action sequences quite easily by anybody wanting nothing more than an easy watch. For me, I was completely taken aback by the sophistication of the characters. In this sort of film, I would expect function characters; that is, those built entirely for a particular purpose, such as the damsel in distress, the irritating rebel, the brains, the brawn… here, the characters have been made deeply, deeply human.

One of the most touching sequences in the film, which caught me totally off-guard, was a death sequence in the plane wreckage where the protagonist and the remaining few survivors speak to a man who has suffered injuries beyond recovery. It’s an incredibly touching scene. It really generates a sense of sympathy for these characters, and a desire to see them survive rather than fall victim to the attacks of the wolves, which is how we might have responded had these characters not been so well fleshed out.

It was fantastically scary, most noticeably in how it can establish and demolish tension in a single sound or shot. These wolves are not the mutants of The Hills Have Eyes who come and disappear from the narrative as they please. These wolves are always there, observing, waiting and watching, and you feel their near-omniscient presence in every sequence. They looked brilliant. Completely believable. They were, quite genuinely, terrifying.

I was so incredibly pleased with its ending too. There is a realism to this film, particularly in its brutality, that makes it near-impossible to believe that the band of survivors could ever survive or escape. The audience has to create their own ending, and although we want desperately to believe there is some hope that he could have survived his confrontation with the alpha wolf, we know how unlikely it is. But the fact is still there: there is a hope that he could survive. After all, he was trained to kill them. For me, this ending drew further profundity from the subtexts of the film. There is a running narrative of religion and the role of faith, which reaches its climax in the closing scenes. I thought the most interesting was the development of Neeson’s character, and how his transformation is represented on the screen, particularly after learning the tragic fate of his wife as having died rather than simply left him. This character who, at the beginning of the film, puts his rifle in his own mouth with every intention of pulling the trigger is suddenly left alone, and still he draws hope. Even though his wife is gone and we hear no mention of any children, he draws hope from somewhere and prepares for his life. Perhaps the significance isn’t whether he survives the fight or not, but the fact that he decided to fight at all.

It sounds almost ridiculously dismissive, but the film quite cleverly manages to invert the werewolf legend which is referenced a couple of times by characters. These survivors are criminals, or at least the rejects of society. They are characters who, in the opening scenes, we learn to abhor and detest. Yet, after their encounter with these wolves, and their journey with each other, they have separated entirely from these roots and become human, inverting this transformation from man to wolf. I don’t know whether this was intentional in the screenplay, but I thought it was an interesting point. It is these characters that make The Grey an outstanding film, and for that reason I’ll be sure to see it again as soon as possible.