THE WIND / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: EMMI TAMMI / SCREENPLAY: TERESA SUTHERLAND / STARRING: CAITLIN GERARD, JULIA GOLDANI TELLES, ASHLEY ZUKERMAN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
In a startlingly bold directorial debut, Emma Tammi takes a traditional tale of folk in the late 1800s Western frontier and turns their isolation into something more untamed than the just the landscape, resulting in writer Teresa Sutherland’s curious hybrid of Meek’s Cutoff, The VVitch and The Babadook. And while not as successful as any of those films, it’s a damn good effort.
Caitlin Gerard stars as Lizzy, a woman living in the middle of nowhere with her husband, surrounded by the graves of those who tried to make prairie living work but failed. Alone for days on end, Lizzy believes that there’s something otherworldly out there in the wind, something that visits her in a variety of guises. Or is it just in her lonely, bored unfulfilled mind? When a young couple move in next door (some distance away, doubling the population for miles around), dynamics change, sympathies shift and our ability to tell what’s real and what isn’t puts us right in LIzzy’s head…
Written, photographed, directed by (and mainly about) women, what makes The Wind a breath of fresh air is the perspective on that old horror standard, “the hysterical female.” For the most part, Lizzy, beautifully played by Caitlin Gerard, is a character who keeps us guessing, providing us with a complex mixture of sympathy, curiosity and doubt. We’re just not sure if we believe her or not, but the film manages to avoid the kind of cliches such a character can all too often fall into, and her journey is as unsettling to us as it is to her. Both the character and the portrayal of her are impressively strong.
The film’s other great strength is Tammi’s powerful, visually striking, impressively composed direction. The film is gorgeous, belying what one suspects to be small budget, conjuring beauty, menace, awe and dread within her perfectly formed framing, aided beautifully by superb cinematography from Lyn Moncrief.
The pace so beautifully set up in the first acts, where the past and present intertwine to reveal what’s going on, falters a little when the big scares show up (and there are some superb ones), but horror audiences need some kind of payoff so you can forgive the filmmakers that.
Ultimately though, this confident debut is well worth seeing, its ambiguities making it even more intriguing to see what Tammi, Sutherland and Moncrief come up with next. Let’s hope it isn’t a long wait, because one gets the feeling that if this had been the debut of a man, his new film would have already been rolling. Tammi is a talent we all deserve to see more of.
