Cold Blows the Wind is a timely and welcome reminder that you don’t need huge budgets, globe-trotting locations or even a superstar cast to craft a gripping, well-rounded, creepy and atmospheric thriller. Director Eric Williford’s film is very much a chamber piece – most of the action takes place in the remote country lodge where leads Dean (Danell Leyva) and Tasha (Victoria Vertuga) are enjoying a break and celebrating Tasha’s birthday. We discover that when driving home from their celebrations, they hit and injured a jogger – but the couple fears the consequences when it emerges that Tasha was drunk driving. Tasha is keen to get the injured jogger to hospital, but Dean takes a reckless and bloody course of action to protect Tasha and stabs the jogger to death. They bury his body in the nearby misty woods. Then, a mysterious woman named Blair (Jamie Bernadette) turns up at their door seeking sanctuary from a man who’s pursuing her… and she reveals that she saw the pair bury the jogger’s body. She also utters the eerie warning that in the forest, “dead things tend not to stay dead.”
At this point, the film quickly transforms from what initially appears to be a fairly traditional murder thriller into something much more supernatural and, at times, quite unnerving. There’s clearly more to Blair than meets the eye, and when Dean heads back to the forest to check on their handiwork, it becomes evident that Blair isn’t quite who – or what – she appears to be. The scenes between Blair and Tasha crackling with tension and menace and by the time Dean returns from the woods the situation has spiralled out of control, there’s another body to dispose of and Tasha clearly isn’t quite the woman she was.
Cold Blows the Wind benefits not only from a script that dances at the edge of blackly humorous but also from game performances from its cast (particularly the pneumatic Vertuga), who are clearly relishing the crisp, no-nonsense dialogue and the opportunity to take things to the next level when the story demands it. Williford’s direction is accomplished and stylish in a film that belies its doubtless tiny budget and, even when it drifts into more traditional horror territory in the final reels, it never betrays its indie roots yet manages to show better-funded studio horror a clean and bloody pair of heels. A chilling treat.
COLD BLOWS THE WIND is available on digital platforms in the US.
