Movie Review: The Wind

The Wind **** / *****

Directed by: Emma Tammi   

Written by: Teresa Sutherland   

Starring: Caitlin Gerard (Lizzy Macklin), Julia Goldani Telles (Emma Harper), Ashley Zukerman (Isaac Macklin), Dylan McTee (Gideon Harper), Miles Anderson (The Reverend).

 

The Wind is a horror/Western hybrid where the villainous outside force may well be nothing more than loneliness. The film takes place on the desolate plains of America, sometime in the 1900s, and really just has a handful of characters. There is Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman) – who until recently were the only settlers in this part of the country. They are joined by Emma (Julia Goldani Telles) and her husband Gideon (Dylan McTee) – who move into an old cabin not far away. We know from the outset that things here are not going to end well – the opening scene has Caitlin walk out of her house, covered in blood that is not hers, cradling a dead new born. We will spend the next 87 minutes constantly in Caitlin’s company, seeing things from her point-of-view. We will bounce around in time as well – from when Emma and Gideon arrive, until Emma ends up dead on their table, her baby dead as well, and what happens after – when Isaac goes away for a few days and leaves Lizzy by herself. Eventually, we’ll flash back even farther to Lizzie’s own ill-fated pregnancy. The wind is constantly howling outside their small home – and there are strange noises all around. But are those noises supernatural? Are they only in Lizzie’s head? I’m not sure the movie ever really resolves that – and it doesn’t much need to.

 

The Wind is a horror movie clearly made on a budget – and that doesn’t hurt it in the least. The debut film from director Emma Tammi, does an excellent job at establishing atmosphere, and doesn’t really concern itself with gore or violence – although the film can get bloody when it needs to. I don’t think it’s a coincidence the movie is called The Wind – also the name of a 1928 film by Victor Sjostrom, starring Lillian Gish as a woman from out East, who moves West with her family, and is slowly driven mad. We sense the same process may well have happened to Lizzy as well – although by the time we meet her, she is already unreliable in terms of what he sees, what she thinks, what she remembers. But because we spend all our time with her, she is the most relatable character out there.

 

The film could be described as a feminist Western if you want to – not because it portrays either Lizzie or Emma as some sort of feminist forerunner, but because I think it shows more accurately what their lives were like – and how little control they have over them. Lizzy moved out here because Isaac wanted to – and now Emma has had to do the same because of Gideon. The husbands are both very different – Isaac is the strong, silent type, Gideon is more nervous and doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into. What they have in common is that neither really understand their wives. They love them – in their way – but that only goes so far. Isaac dismisses Lizzy’s concerns outright – he doesn’t want to hear them, and thinks out of sight, out of mind. Gideon has no idea what to do with his wife – who is a city girl at heart, and is now stuck on the plain with no one around.

 

Of course though, we only ever see the rest of the characters as Lizzy herself sees them – we barely get a portrait of Gideon at all, because she barely speaks with him. Emma can bounce from one extreme to the next – and we never really know how much of what we see Emma do or say (or write) is accurate. Emma’s journey mirror’s Lizzy’s – but is that because this is what these desolate plains do to every woman – or is it because Lizzy reads too much into what Emma does?

 

The film is a slow burn of a Western and a horror film for that matter. Maybe it’s because I just watched Monte Hellman’s 1966 Western double bill – The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind – but I thought about those films while watching this one. All of them have small casts, desolate plains – and are devoid of Western tropes like town, law enforcement, community, etc. They are all about characters having their own private apocalypse.