D: Joe Carnahan. S: Joe Carnahan, Ian MacKenzie Jeffers. P: Jules Daly, Joe Carnahan, Ridley Scott, Mickey Liddell. Cast: Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Entertainment Film Distributors.

The Grey is an absolute must-see: a cracking survival tale expertly mingling grainy realism with adrenaline-popping action scenes, in much the same mould as Lee Tamahori’s similarly harrowing The Edge (1997). While The Edge chose an unashamedly cerebral path – a brain-versus-brawn parable, intelligently written by David Mamet, pitting bookish millionaire Anthony Hopkins against a savage Kodiak bear – The Grey paints a far less optimistic picture of man’s chances in the wilderness. Nature is red in tooth and claw, totally without pity: it has no other purpose or desire than to rip you apart. Survival depends on a mixture of total violence and blind luck. All the book-learnin’ in the world won’t do you a lick of good against starving timber wolves – animals comparable in size and ferocity to a Rick Baker werewolf, and horribly real.

Neeson is a grizzled rifleman, hired to protect Alaskan oil workers against the threat of marauding wildlife. The society of these honest men of toil seems a notch or two below the Port Royal of Henry Morgan: a den of brawling cut-throats, ready to pull a knife or crack a skull at the least provocation. But Neeson has other troubles; he’s just lost the love of his life, and he’s on the brink of ending it all. He and a rowdy handful of workers have reached the end of their tour of duty, and are heading back to civilisation on the next flight out. The plane lifts off, and Neeson loses himself in gloomy reverie – but then the aircraft hits bad weather. In a terrifyingly realistic sequence, seen entirely from the perspective of the passengers, the plane comes apart in mid-air and crashes. By an amazing stroke of luck, nearly all of Neeson’s party survive the impact (though the flight crew are all killed) – and are left freezing and stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a vicious blizzard, burning wreckage, mangled corpses…oh, and a pack of ravening timber wolves, who resent this intrusion into their territory and begin inexorably closing in on the ragged survivors.

Director Joe Carnahan rarely puts a foot wrong throughout, employing a gritty, no-nonsense style partway between cinema verité and knock-your-socks-off sensationalism. It works superbly. The bearded troupe of misfits of which Neeson is elected de facto leader start off as unlikeable rednecks, but careful direction and performances gradually reveal nuances of character and human vulnerability. And the tension is ramped up with merciless skill. From the shocking plane crash onwards, the line between second- and first-hand experience is blurred to the point where it’s almost invisible. Frightened men cluster around a feeble campfire in the ruins of their aircraft, watching with mounting horror as glittering eyes appear around them in the darkness, and start creeping closer, ever closer. You can’t even turn your back for a second to take a piss: before you know it, your guts are spread all over the snow. As for stragglers, forget it – the wolves pick them off just for fun. And quietly, methodically, Neeson collects the wallets of the dead men, to take back to civilisation – that’s if any of them are left alive…

The Grey’s central thesis, the cold indifference of nature, is expressed with relentless conviction. Time and again the survivors make it through appalling odds, only to fall victim to some new caprice. But it never descends into hopelessness; the film is dotted throughout by little snippets of memory, as Neeson recalls certain indelible parts of his life, supplying bursts of colour and feeling in an otherwise monochromatic landscape of snow and sky. (The sections dealing with his lost love must have been especially hard for Neeson, so soon after his own bereavement, and the compacted emotion in these scenes is brutally real.) The film is bookended by Neeson’s recital of a small poem of his father’s, remembered from childhood: all of life and death, in four lines. It makes for an unusually moving conclusion.