THE WIND
Written by Teresa Sutherland
Directed by Emma Tammi
This horror/western starts with Lizzy Mackin, played to absolute perfection by Caitlin Gerard, shuffling out of her isolated homestead, white dress stained in blood, handing a baby over to the distraught, waiting father. This cold opening is a culmination of many tragic events and sets off a back and forth through a time that eventually unpicks the horrifying truth of Lizzy’s circumstances.
Director Emma Tammi, with her cinematographer Lyn Moncrief, revels in the photography that’s there for taking: from the vast expanse of nature’s vistas to the smallest sun-kissed plant waving on a breeze. And yet Tammi also manages to lock the audience into the claustrophobia of a woman alone, convinced she shouldn’t go out after dark or answer the door. What is more Tammi has a real knack for ramping up the dread while neatly serving up the grains of truth supplied by Teresa Sutherland’s excellent non-linear script. The shifting time frames mean what’s real and what’s supernatural gets lost somewhere along the way. The arrival of the Reverend demonstrates that sometimes all a horror film needs is a couple of well delivered, chilling lines of dialogue.
On the surface, THE WIND is about the haunting of Lizzy by the ‘demons of the prairie’...
On the surface, THE WIND is about the haunting of Lizzy by the ‘demons of the prairie’. Working in parallel with those scares and sense of dread is a wonderful cinematic treatise on the fragility of the human mind much more akin Roman Polanski’s REPULSION.
As the tale draws to its mesmeric close the scale of Lizzy’s mental problems are far in excess of things that go bump in the night.
