As harsh as winters may get in your neck of the woods, they won’t seem as troubling after experiencing The Grey. It’s a film unlikely to be endorsed by the Alaska State Parks Board — by comparison, it makes Lee Tamahori’s man vs. nature flick The Edge look like a pleasant picnic in the forest — but viewers prepared to endure a bleak and brutalizing look at the frozen wilderness will have it delivered, with gusto.
Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a lonely, depressed sad sack with a self-admitted run of terrible luck. Employed to protect oil company workers in the Alaskan wilds, the man’s life spirals from bad to worse when a plane wreck strands him in the middle of nowhere with a small group of survivors. Facing death, not only from the elements but from the unfortunate crash site (which is dangerously close to a den of viciously protective wolves), Ottway and the group attempt to come to grips with their less than encouraging chances of survival in the cruel winter landscape.
For a survival-type film, this is among the grimmest in recent memory. Not only is the environment captured in a visually cold and harsh manner, but the hardships faced are unrelenting. The plane crash is covered in horrific detail and is effectively harrowing. For the survivors, moving forward and accomplishing seemingly simple things, like traveling across a snowy plain, become brutal tests of endurance – particularly as the wolves circle, attack and pick off characters trudging in the deep snow. These sequences aren’t overly graphic, but are nail-bitingly tense and especially upsetting. Then, over the course of events, the film seems to become less about the possibility of surviving, and more about facing one’s deepest fears. As someone like John Wayne might say, “dying like a man.”
The cast are all credible as the tough but terrified oil rig workers who are brought together under the worst of circumstances. As the group thins out, the camaraderie and back stories of the group members becomes focused, making their victimizations more poignant than your typical dwindling thriller or horror fodder. Neeson is exceptional as the dispirited Ottway, who carries a more than palpable sense of loss and sadness within his character.
One of the film’s weaker aspects is its digital effects, though. 
It’s entirely understandable, given the nature of the attack scenes, that CGI wolf creations were required to stand in for real animals at certain points. Still, while occasionally convincing, the encroaching beasts look unreal at several moments, which becomes a distraction that briefly takes us out of the film.
The final moments are sure to ruffle the feathers of people out for a simple evening of entertainment, but given the tone of the film the close is entirely appropriate (though viewers who wait through the credits will have one of the questions left dangling answered). In the end, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey seeks to establish a sense of dread and horror and does so with ease. It’s a tense, uncomfortable and, at times, hopeless trip into the most unforgiving of natural elements.
