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THE WIND (2019)
Director: Emma Tammi Cast: Caitlin Gerard, Ashley Zukerman, Julia Goldani Telles, Dylan McTee, Miles Anderson, Martin C Patterson MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:26 Release Date: 4/5/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2019 The setting of The Wind seems almost too perfect for a horror movie. It's the late 1800s somewhere in the American West, in a frontier house where nothing or no one can be found for miles. Miles in this era, of course, means at least several hours by horse, so in case of emergency, a person's only chance is self-reliance or pure luck. In case of some demonic presence that is hell-bent on causing a person harm or worse, neither of those things is going to come in handy. Director Emma Tammi makes good use of this setting—the time period and the location—and the lack of any basic convenience, which would make survival under the circumstances a little easier, that it affords. For a while, the movie is convincingly eerie in its use of natural lighting and ambient sound, as well as the absence of either of those elements. There's a distinct sense of helplessness to the plight of Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard), a woman of the frontier who finds herself quite alone after Emma (Julia Goldani Telles), one of her two neighbors, dies under suspicious circumstances. Lizzy's husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman), looking to get supplies, and Emma's husband Gideon (Dylan McTee), preparing to depart the West, leave for the nearby town. Meanwhile, Lizzy, alone in the wilderness, is subjected to wolves and shadows and visions of her dead neighbor. It all becomes fairly generic, as ghosts/demonic figures, which may be real or just hallucinations, begin to terrorize Lizzy. The story itself, which hinges on questions of Lizzy's sanity or the reality of supernatural evil or both, and the way in which it is told, through layers of flashbacks, are far less convincing than the use of the setting. Teresa Sutherland's screenplay provides the sort of horror story that works when there's a sense of immediacy to its potential terror and mystery. The structure here, which uses those flashbacks to explain a lot, undermines that immediacy. The flashbacks of The Wind help to contextualize the dread, but in the process, the movie perhaps goes a couple of steps too far. Ultimately, it feels as if it's portraying these women, not as haunted and wounded people, but as hopeless and possibly hysterical—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—cases. That certainly does its depiction of frontierswomen no favors. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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