The Wind might be far from a perfect psychological/supernatural horror film, but it has enough going for it to keep things interesting. Rather than relying completely on scare tactics, The Wind’s most interesting elements lie in the gradual erosion of its main character’s sanity. There are scares – or at least attempted ones – but these are thankfully not the focus. Instead, director Emma Tammi and writer Teresa Sutherland have chosen to place their story in within the psyche of a young woman isolated on a windswept plot of land in the middle of a desolate 19th-century prairie rather than in the hands of some maniac with an ax or knife.
It takes some time for The Wind to get its bearings. The multiple timeline approach eventually works, but only after several attempts and some confusing missteps. Once established and a clearer picture starts to emerge, the discrepancies between what’s stated in one time and shown in another begin to make a chilling kind of sense. By the end, reality and fantasy have commingled nearly to the point of tedium, but with just enough visual ghostly flare to keep it on track.
Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) is a young wife living with her husband (Ashley Zukerman) on the grim plains of the American frontier. Their life is seemingly normal until new neighbors arrive (Julia Goldani Telles and Dylan McTee). However, sporadic clues reveal that things might not be as they appear when Lizzy begins to experience demonic and unnatural events in and around the homestead. For reasons I won’t say, she’s left alone by her husband for an extended period and things go from bad to worse. Through the fractured timeline, we learn that what she’s suffering may not be new phenomena and that there’s more to her nightmare than meets the eye.
The early reliance on cliched jump scares could have derailed the film altogether, but thankfully those give way to a more mysterious and abstract fear – even though some of these elements are lifted right out of the long-running Supernatural television series. Nonetheless, the attempt at betterment is appreciated. What holds The Wind firmly in the positive is the exploration of Lizzy’s disintegrating mental state (captured with relish by Gerard) and the slow realization that this is, in many ways, a stylish, female-centric retelling of the Tom Dooley legend (with a slightly different but no less grisly ending).
What’s most exciting about The Wind, though, is the promise it shows for its rookie director. Tammi pulls off some neat tricks and her instincts behind the camera seem sound. If you were to strip down the premise to its barest essentials – life on the prairie as told from a woman’s perspective – that alone should intrigue. Once you’ve added the genre-twisting angle, just like that we’re suddenly in pleasantly unfamiliar territory. The Wind is flawed, but most of its weaknesses are made up for with ingenuity and a unique, welcomed female perspective on two different, tired genres.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.