Yeah, the contrast levels are all over the place in this game. What mostly worked for me was to just bump up the black level setting one tick on my Sony Bravia X85J, and boost the in-game HDR peak level to like 80.
It seems like the HDR screen brightness setting in the game doesn't actually do anything. Only the UI brightness and the HDR peak level settings do. Meh....maybe that will get patched later, who knows.
But then again, The Dark Anthology games seemed flaky in HDR too (well, the first two anyway, House of Ashes seemed OK). I just ended up playing them in SDR to avoid the weirdness. I don't think they ever patched them for the wonky HDR issues though, so not really expecting them to do anything about it in The Quarry either. Thing is, The Quarry doesn't give you an in-game choice to play in SDR, so you'd have to change that at the console and/or TV level, which I really don't want to hassle with just for one game. Sigh.....first world problems....