Hair of the Bear searches out psychological thrills in a lethal landscape
At the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival, filmmaker Alexandre Trudeau and star Malia Baker confront anxiety and mortality in the deep freeze of the Prairies
Malia Baker in Hair of the Bear.
The Rendez-Vous French Film Festival presents Hair of the Bear at the Rio Theatre on March 8
OUTSIDE OF THE TOWNS and cities, we inhabit an empty country of inconceivably vast wilderness, extreme climate conditions, and a million ways to die. Not a bad place to set your frigid backwoods thriller, right? “It’s kind of a Western, but up in the north,” says filmmaker Alexandre Trudeau, speaking to Stir from his office in Montreal about Hair of the Bear. “And the main thread is, really, this land will kill you.”
Written and directed with his old pal James McLellan, Trudeau’s debut feature closes the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival at the Rio on March 8. And yes, he’s Justin’s brother, a.k.a. Sacha. “We all live comfortable lives in the city,” Trudeau continues. “But that’s the reality of this country. It’s a killer country. I know it in my family.”
We’ve encountered this theme before in prestige titles like The Revenant and schlocky Canuck efforts including Cold Comfort: hapless individual gets lost in the Subzero Nowhere, pursued by ferocious wildlife or something even worse. What distinguishes Hair of the Bear is that Trudeau and McLellan elect to throw an anxiety-ridden 16-year-old girl into the deep freeze.
Played by Malia Baker (The Baby-Sitters Club; she also shares a producer credit), Tori is a disconsolate dropout and city kid who’s been shipped by Mom to her grandfather’s remote cabin on the edge of a frozen lake. He’s a skilled outdoorsman and patient guide as he walks the teen through rigorous survival techniques. Tori begins to warm to the challenge when, naturally, trouble arrives. Big trouble.
“The genesis of the story was, well, let’s tell the story of a young woman curing herself of anxiety,” says Trudeau, whose friendship with McLellan began when they both studied as officers in the Canadian Armed Forces. “He was doing fine arts, specifically pottery. And I was studying metaphysics. We were not normal,” he laughs. “We were in the military, partly, from that old expression, to test your mettle.” Hair of the Bear suggests that “if you can get into contact with the survival side of yourself, you will cure your anxiety.”
Baker was 17 when shooting commenced in Lac du Bonnet, about 75 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. “They don’t tell you about how cold the still air is. It’s insane,” she tells Stir in a separate call from her Vancouver home. It was her first visit to the Prairies, “in the middle of a frozen lake. And it was the time of my life. Best way to spend a winter when you’re 17 is that. It was the best time ever.”
It was also, both parties attest, a bit gruelling. “I’m a warm-blooded gal and that was not the easiest for me,” Baker sighs. Scenes of a panicked Tori sloshing across the surface of a lake that appears to be melting added to her stress. “What you hear is the ice cracking and it sounds like gunshots, which is already terrifying. I thought we were in the middle of some hunting retreat, and they’re like, ‘No, it’s just the ice breaking!’”
Baker talks about “putting your blind trust in people even when every single part of your body is telling you to leave, go home, ‘This isn’t safe…,’” but she also had a real life guide in the shape of Roy Dupuis, taking the role of Tori’s grandfather Ben. He’s a legend of Québécois cinema, but only when he isn’t removing himself from the psychosis of urban life.
“He’s not acting, eh?” says Trudeau. “That’s who he is. He’s no-nonsense, a bit of a recluse, he lives in the country, he chops wood, he builds. He’s the proper woodsman, almost Zarathustra in the mountains. This is a guy who’s broken with the world.” About Zarathustra: Baker bonded with Dupuis over, among other enthusiasms, Philip Glass and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. “He’s an amazing person to look up to in terms of keeping your personal life separate from what you do creatively,” she says.
Also featuring Robert Naylor and Jonathan Lawrence as the trouble—in this case, two brothers on a mysterious mission of their own—Trudeau and McLellan have crafted a distinctly Canadian thriller that puts a sometimes excruciating game of cat and mouse inside a merciless natural killscape, externalizing the anxiety that McLellan was seeing among youth in his work as a high school teacher. This evolved into a script that, to everyone’s credit, doesn’t go too hard on its big metaphor. Baker’s intuitions are equally well deployed.
“It’s no easy role for a 17-year-old,” says Trudeau. “It’s a roller-coaster-transformation sort of role and we needed someone who could carry that. When we Zoomed with Malia the first time, a number of things struck us: what poise she had—she was already a pro at 15. She’s no-nonsense, super smart, and had not just read the script but deeply understood it.”
“What they won’t tell you,” Baker adds with a big laugh, “is that they put me through the wringer in that Zoom call. I remember reading the script and just being in tears by the end. Like, ‘They don’t understand how much I get her.’ I remember pleading. I was fighting for this role regardless if they were looking at anybody else. I remember them asking, ‘Why should we give you Tori?’”
Good question! Baker was ready with the answer, explaining that she was just a few years downriver from a disabling disorder called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), which struck when she was in the eighth grade. “So I was in a wheelchair for around a year at that time,” she continues, smiling broadly. “I know. Wild story. Then I retaught myself how to walk. I remember ranting to Sacha and James about it.”
“This role would wreck anybody,” Trudeau states. "Yet she was a warrior. I had good vibes but you never know. The surprise was, like, ‘Holy shit! She’s unflappable! She can do it all!’ For a young person to carry that off? I dunno. I’m in awe. I was surprised by her level of commitment. Just all in.”
Trudeau describes Hair of the Bear as “visceral, a pyjama film, a thrill ride,” and the viewer can take or leave the theme of anxiety. But it also lends the film a subtextual power that might connect with Canadians in a broader way. “It’s a simple film with a simple message,” he concludes. “Sometimes you have to fight. Which is kind of the metaphor for the moment right now in this country. Despite being weaker, smaller, younger, you fight for your life.” 
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