Welcome to ordeal by cinema. Pack a coat because it's going to get cold and best start with a light breakfast because there's plenty of blood to test a busy stomach.
This gruelling survivalist fare sees a handful of oil-rig roughnecks emerge from a plane crash into the forgotten wastes of Alaska.
If the snow and the savagery is not enough to finish off what the crash failed to achieve, then they are hounded, harried and occasionally eaten by a pack of rogue wolves with the monstrous Grey out front, as canny and mean as a velociraptor.
Keeping the survivors alive is Liam Neeson's John Ottway, perhaps never better as the haunted marksman who becomes the human pack's alpha determined to survive against the odds, despite earlier gnawing on his rifle over thoughts of a lost love.
So the threadbare trail to survival becomes a road to redemption for a bunch of tough-on-top headbangers who escaped to the rig to forget love and life.
But this is no calm reflection on the crisis of modern man. The howling, penetrating wind, the broken bodies, the visceral fight for life is stuck right there on the screen by director Joe Carnahan who gets down and dirty with some lo-fi, palm-sweating challenges for his shivering hunks.
The fireside reflections of times past become corny and portentous but the script is feisty with flashes of wit that captures the bickering and banter of lads with brave faces painted upon timorous souls. ("I'm much more of a cat person," says one after a foray by the pack).
The Grey is not for the faint-hearted but it will take you to another place and asks some tough questions. Like - how do you want to live and, more pertinently, how do you want to die?
