phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2019

The Wind



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 28min
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Plot Summary: A plains-woman faces the harshness and isolation of the untamed land in the Western frontier of the late 1800s.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

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Outside Reviews:

Simon Abrams
3.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

"The Wind," an impressive horror/western hybrid, is the kind of artful genre movie that some filmgoers think simply doesn't get made anymore. It's a modestly-scaled character study about Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard), a resourceful, alienated frontierswoman who—living in a desolate cabin in the middle of an undisclosed part of 19th century America—slowly loses her grip on reality. Over the course of the movie's 87-minute runtime, director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Teresa Sutherland pare down Lizzy's narrative so that viewers only see and understand what Lizzy (often reluctantly) sees and understands herself. The resulting episodic narrative is light on dialogue and heavy on ambiance; it's precise to an unsettling degree since a number of scenes start and stop whenever Lizzy can feel her way in and out of them. And most importantly: the scenes we do see are not in linear or chronological order—they are shown to us as they are recalled by Lizzy, not as she originally experienced them.


Chris Nashawaty
Grade: B- - The Wind is an indie horror Western with a feminist twist: EW review

The Wind flirts with some interesting themes about postpartum depression, female jealousy, hallucinatory paranoia, and hellfire possession, all goosed by a feminist twist in what’s typically a masculine genre. Is Emma really in the thrall of a prairie demon, or is this just a figment of Lizzy’s imagination since her new neighbor is about to have the child she was unable to? There’s enough potential unreliable-narrator fuzziness to Gerard’s character that the film could have become far more interesting (and profound) if it wasn’t so hell-bent on taking the easy way out with its supernatural nonsense. The moments that work the best are the ones where Tammi lets the pace and pulse slow down, lets the ominous wind whistle and groan, and it isn’t trying to turn The Wind into Meek’s Cutoff as interpreted by the director of Insidious.