Malia Baker stars in Hair of the Bear as Tori, a teenage girl sent to the wilderness to spend time with her grandfather.Supplied
Hair of the Bear
Written and directed by James McLellan and Alexandre Trudeau
Starring Malia Baker, Robert Naylor and Roy Dupuis
Classification N/A; 92 minutes
In select theatres March 6
In The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio’s hero had to escape a grizzly attack and chow down on raw bison liver. In 127 Hours, James Franco’s character sawed off his own arm. And in The Grey, Liam Neeson bare-knuckle brawled with a pack of wolves while stranded in Alaska. When it comes to wilderness-survival movies, the more intense the scenario, the better. And yet in the new Canadian thriller Hair of the Bear, the extremes are limited to a few gunshots and the brief (if gruesome) deployment of a hammer.
I suppose the lowered scale of expectations is on brand for a tiny Canadian film, though it’s not as if Hair of the Bear arrives without its own unique brand of star pedigree. The feature marks the co-directorial debut of two longtime friends: James McLellan and Alexandre Trudeau, the latter being the son of Pierre Elliott and the brother of Justin. While Trudeau has made a career in the film world through his documentary work, this is his first narrative feature, and the first on-screen credit for McLellan (the two met as officers in the Canadian Armed Forces). Unfortunately, the inexperience for, and ambitions of, both men is evident from the film’s opening frames.
Roy Dupuis plays Tori’s grandfather Ben.Supplied
We’re introduced to Tori (Malia Baker) as she stumbles through the frozen woods, the teenage girl shivering and alone and seemingly on her very last breath. How she got into that perilous position is the mystery at the heart of the film, which McLellan and Trudeau unravel in exacting, if not particularly pulse-pounding, detail over the next 90 minutes.
Sent to spend some quality time alone with her grandfather Ben (Roy Dupuis) in an unnamed patch of remote wilderness – the film was shot about 75 minutes northeast of Winnipeg, though Dupuis’s frequent deployment of French suggest it’s the backwoods of Quebec – Tori seems barely capable to survive her own inner turmoil. A troubled teen whose wrists tell a certain story, Tori is frustrated with life, and with her mother’s plan to ship her off for two weeks in the middle of nowhere.
For the film’s first 20 minutes or so, it feels as if McLellan and Trudeau are constructing an intimate family drama about the tenuous bonds between two wildly different generations. But then Tori and Ben stumble upon two twentysomething brothers (Robert Naylor and Jonathan Lawrence) who are in need of their help, but are also clearly up to no good. And so begins a cat-and-mouse game that forces Tori to question how much she wants to give up on life, and how much she desperately wants to live to see another day.
This is the first narrative feature for co-director Alexandre Trudeau, and the first on-screen credit for James McLellan.Supplied
In its conception, there is a good deal to admire about McLellan and Trudeau’s vision, which aims to mix heavy emotional themes with the kind of visceral violence that typically make genre thrillers such an easy sell. With the right kind of script and visual imagination, a bare-bones, small-cast production can be elevated into something that feels bigger and bolder.
Yet Hair of the Bear never fully realizes its potential at the same time that it fails to escapes its own self-imposed limitations. The story takes too long to arrive at the dark truth of Tori’s predicament, and the various stand-offs that follow never gain a true sense of emotional or narrative escalation. Bad things happen, then continue to happen, until audiences feel much like Tori: exhausted and searching for rescue.
While one sequence goes the extra mile in terms of pure bodily-harm terror – a moment that feels somewhat inspired by the previous work of the film’s cinematographer, Stefan Ciupek, who also worked on Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – the film sputters out, as if McLellan and Trudeau cannot quite convince themselves that they’re making an out-and-out thriller.
For those looking to the film as some kind of tool to help decipher the Trudeau political legacy, well, good luck. (Although there might be something to the film’s villainous brothers, one of whom is more eagerly cruel than the other.) And for those who approach Hair of the Bear hoping for some ice-cold survivalist excitement, well, that will be a tough task, too.
But McLellan and Trudeau do make one excellent, unimpeachable decision: casting Dupuis. The veteran Quebec actor’s mere presence is enough to give the film an immediate sense of gravitas, even if the focus is on the solid but not exceptionally charismatic Baker. Perhaps Trudeau can offer Dupuis a meatier role the next time around. There’s got to be a market for a Maxime Bernier biopic, no?